This article tests cultural and economic explanations of why the longest surviving illiberal government in Central Europe, Hungary’s FIDESZ, has maintained popular support throughout two elections despite dismantling institutional checks and balances. Much of the literature on illiberalism in Central Europe attributes the appeal and successes of these governments to the brand of identity politics and rhetorical vilification of “others” practiced by their leaders. Yet the role of economic growth, a strong determinant of voter behaviour, has received little theoretical attention in accounting for illiberal party support. Using five rounds of European Social Survey data from 2010 to 2018, I show that economic satisfaction rather than a host of cultural factors, notably anti-migrant and anti-European Union attitudes, better predicts support for FIDESZ and satisfaction with government. I examine the implications of these results for understanding and conceptualising voter behaviour under backsliding. Voters may not understand what backsliding is and therefore are unable to penalise it or they may take information about backsliding into account and judge backsliding to be the price of prosperity. These findings and the discussion of voter behaviour raise important questions about the role of economic growth in sustaining illiberalism in Central Europe and other third wave democracies.

Despite many experiments examining voter attitudes towards illiberal and undemocratic political behaviour, few explicitly address how and when their results meaningfully suggest that voters cannot be relied upon to protect liberal institutions and democratic procedures. How do these results correspond to verbal claims that a country case is at risk of democratic decline? While a simple meta-analysis of conjoint experiments encouragingly shows that respondents reliably punish undemocratic behaviour, it obscures an important subset of candidate contests and a central quantity of interest -- the proportion of partisan respondents who support an undemocratic copartisan candidate in the face of a pro-democratic out-party opponent. A reanalysis of like experiments shows that enough partisans in long-standing democracies defect to the out-party candidate for democratic decline to be highly unlikely. In new democracies with highly popular and electorally dominant incumbents, such as the Philippines, the proportion of partisans from the incumbent bloc remaining with their undemocratic copartisan is worryingly high. A preregistered conceptual conjoint replication from the Philippines, deployed just prior to the 2022 presidential election, shows that 67% of incumbent supporters remain loyal even when exposed to undemocratic informational treatments.

The scientific method is predicated on transparency -- yet the pace at which transparent research practices are being adopted by the scientific community is slow. The replication crisis in psychology showed that published findings employing statistical inference are threatened by undetected errors, data manipulation, and data falsification. To mitigate these problems and bolster research credibility, open data and preregistration have increasingly been adopted in the natural and social sciences. While many political science and international relations journals have committed to implementing these reforms, the extent of open science practices is unknown. We bring large-scale text analysis and machine learning classifiers to bear on the question. Using population-level data -- 93,931 articles across the top 160 political science and IR journals between 2010 and 2021 -- we find that approximately 21% of all statistical inference papers have open data, and 5% of all experiments are preregistered. Despite this shortfall, the example of leading journals in the field shows that change is feasible and can be effected quickly.