Bucking the Party Line May Not Be as Perilous as People Think

But this fear, while not unfounded, is often significantly overblown, says Trevor Spelman, a PhD student in management and organizations at the Kellogg School.

Spelman collaborated with Kellogg professors of Management and Organizations and codirectors of the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement Eli J. Finkel and Nour Kteily as well as Abdo Elnakouri of the University of Houston to study how Democrats and Republicans respond when people within their own party diverge from their party’s typical view on key issues.

They found that people from both political parties consistently and substantially overestimated how much their own party would penalize them for voicing dissenting opinions.

This tendency to overestimate rejection could have serious implications, Spelman says. The research links it to self-censorship: those anticipating harsher reactions are more likely to withhold dissenting views. When this pattern plays out across many individuals, it can distort the information environment itself—making political parties appear far more uniform than they actually are and masking the diversity of opinions that exists within them.

“Healthy democratic discourse depends on people being willing to voice dissenting views within their own coalitions. But when people systematically overestimate the social costs of doing so, we end up with a distorted picture of what people actually believe—and that undermines the quality of political deliberation within parties,” says Finkel, who also serves as Morton O. Schapiro Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research.

The price of dissent

“Two trends really stood out to me as we were drawing up this project,” says Spelman. “The first is that Americans are becoming increasingly fearful of engaging in political disagreement.”

For example, polling suggests the share of Americans who say they’re afraid to speak their mind jumped from 13 percent in 1954 to 46 percent in 2022.

The second trend is that people seem to increasingly perceive political parties as having a uniform sets of beliefs—leading to the impression that liberals and conservatives tend to fall in line with their party on every major issue. “But in reality, based on public and private polling data, we know that people actually have a diversity of views underneath the surface,” says Spelman.

This mismatch got Spelman thinking. People tend to stay silent when they believe they’re going against the majority. But if Americans are systematically misperceiving how uniform their party actually is, then they may also be overestimating how much backlash they’d face for dissenting.

They put this to the test in a study where they randomly assigned roughly 250 Republicans and 250 Democrats to participate in one of two tasks: either predict on a one-to-seven scale how people in their political party would react to them voicing a dissenting opinion or predict how they themselves would react to someone else dissenting.

A dissenting opinion for Democrats, for instance, was that abortion access should be restricted, which is generally considered a conservative view. While for Republicans, the dissenting opinion was the more-commonly liberal belief that abortion access should be protected.

If people had an accurate idea of how harshly dissent would be punished, the two scores—one, how they thought their copartisans would react to a dissenting opinion, and two, how they would react to a copartisan dissenting—should roughly match up when averaged out over the entire group. But the scores didn’t.

Instead, a clear disconnect emerged.

People anticipating judgment expected moderately harsh social backlash. But those actually doing the judging reported much milder reactions. The average difference—roughly one full point on the scale—represents a substantial overestimation of the social costs associated with dissent.

Anticipated versus actual reactions

The researchers were surprised at how strongly the evidence showed a disconnect between anticipated and actual social reactions to dissent. So they conducted a series of subsequent studies to confirm what they were seeing.

In one, the researchers used the same seven-point-scale survey to examine whether the effect occurred among people who actually met. Pairs of people from the same political party completed a small task. Then some of them learned that their new acquaintance had just softened their views on a party-defining belief. In another study, the researchers examined responses from people who had gone through a shift in opinion in real life.

Time and time again, they saw the same pattern. People significantly overestimated how much backlash they would face for dissenting from the typical stance of their party.

This overestimation appears linked to self-censorship behavior. In the studies, those who anticipated stronger backlash were more likely to report staying silent about dissenting views. If this dynamic plays out widely, it could contribute to the false impression that political parties are more uniform and divided than polling data suggests they actually are.

“When people withhold dissenting views, the views that remain visible are the conforming ones, which can contribute to a false perception of consensus,” says Spelman. “Voicing dissent offers an opportunity to create a more-representative public sphere. We’re not having conversations that might be able to bridge the gap.”

Demonstrating loyalty

The researchers then set out to determine why this overestimation happens. They found a common trend: a fear of appearing disloyal.

Because humans are a social species, people are naturally sensitive to the possibility of social rejection and questions of loyalty, says Spelman. And because beliefs about certain topics like immigration and gun control have seemingly become central to what it means to belong to one party or another, going against the grain can feel like betrayal.

“This aligns with prior research from political and social psychology, which shows that our beliefs on certain topics can function as identity badges. They’re a really strong way for us to signal that we belong and are loyal to our group,” says Spelman.

Dissent, therefore, can risk anger, ridicule, or even exile from the group. Given people’s innate sensitivity to threats of social rejection, humans naturally adopt a better-safe-than-sorry attitude, he adds.

This points to a potential solution.

In one study, people who had changed their minds on a political issue were asked to reflect on how they’d demonstrated loyalty to their party in the past. This simple exercise helped them feel more secure in their group standing—and as a result, they anticipated significantly less rejection for their dissenting views, bringing their expectations more in line with reality.

Breaking the cycle

The findings suggest several practical takeaways.

For one, being aware that people systematically overestimate rejection is itself valuable—it can help calibrate expectations. And the loyalty-reflection exercise offers a concrete tool: reminding yourself of past demonstrations of group commitment can reduce anxiety about appearing disloyal and lead to more-accurate predictions about how others will respond.

But perhaps more importantly, when people do voice dissent—even in the face of some social cost—it makes the actual diversity of opinion within groups more visible. This visibility can help correct the false impression of uniformity that keeps others silent.

“People are staying quiet to avoid backlash that’s much milder than they imagine,” says Spelman. “When enough people realize that and start speaking up, it can shift the information environment—making it easier for the next person, and the next.”

The costs of dissent are real, he emphasizes, but they’re not what people think. “Your fellow partisans may be more open to hearing different views than you expect,” he says. “The challenge is creating conditions where people feel safe enough to find that out.”