Does Information About Democratic Vulnerability Make Citizens Punish Undemocratic Behavior?

Abstract

The rise of authoritarian government in recent decades have sparked scholarly debate on what makes citizens tolerate and punish undemocratic behavior. Extant explanations hold that citizens may vote for undemocratic politicians if these politicians represent their political interests or hold a competence advantage over competitors. In this paper, I consider a different explanation. Specifically, I focus on whether citizens punish undemocratic behavior more when they perceive democracy in their country as vulnerable and provide experimental tests spanning over two data collections from 2020 and 2021 with a total of 12 country samples. I find that voters punish undemocratic behavior, that they punish it more severely than prior studies have suggested, and that undemocratic behavior drives citizens toward voting for alternative options rather than decreases turnout. Contrary to expectations, I also find that democratic vulnerability sometimes but only in a very restricted set of cases matter for sanctioning of undemocratic behavior.

Young People Punish Undemocratic Behaviour Less Than Older People

“…The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0007123423000649 Data availability statement. Replication data for this paper can be found at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DWUHRI (Frederiksen 2023) Competing interests. None.…”

How to study democratic backsliding

“…This suggests the need for a consideration of the structural factors, such as the media ecosystem and socialization that influence backsliding. On the latter point, research finds that young people are less likely to sanction undemocratic behavior than older people (e.g., Claassen & Magalhães, 2023;Frederiksen, 2022c;Holliday et al, 2023), which is perhaps unsurprising given they tend to have been socialized at a time that has led them to exhibit relatively high levels of affective polarization (Tyler & Iyengar, 2022). I do not intend to end on a pessimistic note; the intervention literature is a promising first step, but it needs to move toward not only considering structural factors but also the multidimensional nature of backsliding.…”