Honors Theses
Date of Award
Spring 5-10-2025
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Jonathan Klingler
Second Advisor
Miles Armaly
Third Advisor
Julie Wronski
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
The violent events of January 6, 2021 explicitly demonstrated the widening ideological gap in the United States, as citizens and members of Congress both questioned the results of the 2020 election. This research paper seeks to understand if this increasing ideological extremity might manifest itself as questioning the legitimacy of an election among members of Congress. Researchers across decades have studied the sort of effects that increasing ideological extremity can have on voters; however, I could not find much research on how it might affect members of Congress. I theorize that ideological extremity amongst members of Congress is causing them to lose their support for the American system of liberal democracy, and in the case of this paper, this lack of support will be measured as lack of belief in the validity of an American election. I will study the effects of ideological extremity on support for the United States government by examining the Nokken Poole scores of Congressional members in relation to the anti-election speech that they use on Twitter. After running linear regressions, I, ultimately, was able to establish a correlational relationship between the tested variables, which suggested that as members of Congress become more extreme, their support for the American system declines. While I was not able to definitively establish causation, these results indicate that the increasing polarization of Congress has a relationship with their support for the United States government. This calls into question the ability of members of Congress to safeguard the very tenets of government that they were elected to protect, if they are losing support for them, and it is unclear what, exactly, are the broader implications that this decline in support might have on the American public.
Recommended Citation
Reeks, Emily C., "The Mechanism of Election Denial: How Ideological Extremism Leads to Anti-Support for the United States Government" (2025). Honors Theses. 3232.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/3232
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
