Replication Data for: Contemporary Views of Liberal Democracy and the 2016 Presidential Election

What are Americans’ views on liberal democracy? Have their attitudes changed since the 1950s? How do their attitudes about liberal democracy shape political behavior, like vote choice? We replicated Herbert McClosky’s (1964) seminal study on a module to the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Our exploration of 26 survey questions reveals both continuity and change in Americans’ attitudes towards liberal democracy. While Americans have become more hostile towards some standard democratic procedural rules of the game, we also find that they harbor more tolerant attitudes towards racial and ethnic equality. We subjected respondents’ answers to an exploratory factor analysis (EFA). The EFA reveals three distinct dimensions regarding democratic values, which we label “Elitism,” “Authoritarianism,” and “Racial Supremacy.” Elitism and racial supremacy significantly influenced Americans’ political behavior in the 2016 presidential election.