How resilient are civil liberties in times of external threat, and how does political polarisation shape them?
In his contribution to SPP's Issue 1/2026, Afiq bin Oslan shows: Partisan cues matter, but do not clearly increase the willingness to restrict liberties.
Read more: doi.org/10.1515/spp-...
How does support for civil liberties prevail in times of external threat? Simultaneously, how does internal polarisation affect how tightly citizens hold to these liberties? We argue citizens may follow partisanship in evaluating foreign threats, supporting erosion of liberties if co-partisans advocate it in favour of national security. We conduct a survey experiment on a representative sample of 3281 US citizens, treating them with vignettes of potential conflict with China attributed to randomly varying partisanship. We interact such treatments with respondents’ own partisanship, then measure support for various civil liberties. Our findings yield mixed results and we are unable to decisively demonstrate that co-partisans are better at encouraging the surrender of civil liberties. This is congruent with other recent research that also shows partisan polarisation may neither lighten nor worsen in times of external threat.
