Guardians of Democracy or Passive Bystanders? A Conjoint Experiment on Elite Transgressions of Democratic Norms

Abstract

Emerging literature shows that citizens in established democracies do not unconditionally support central democratic principles when asked to weigh them against co-partisanship or favored policy positions. However, these studies are conducted in highly polarized contexts, and it remains unclear whether the underlying mechanisms also operate in more consensual contexts. Furthermore, it is unclear whether “critical citizens” or satisfied democrats are more eager to support democratic principles. We study these questions with evidence from a conjoint experiment conducted in Finland ( n = 1030), an established democracy with high levels of democratic satisfaction and a consensual political culture. We examine how transgressions of two central democratic norms, the legitimacy of political opposition and the independence of the judiciary, affect leader favorability. We also explore how these differ across ideological and policy congruence and across levels of political disaffection. Our results show that some segments of the Finnish population are willing to condone authoritarian behavior if this brings them political benefits. Furthermore, we find that satisfied rather than “critical” citizens are more likely to sanction such behavior. These findings suggest that dangers of democratic deconsolidation may appear even in consensus democracies with relatively low levels of political polarization.

When are Democracies at Risk of Democratic Decline? A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Literature and a Conceptual Replication

“…As we would expect, larger treatment effects are intuitively associated with more severe forms of malfaesance. For instance, Mares and Visconti's (2020) study in Romania focus on vote buying and other election-related clientelistic practices while Saikkonen and Christensen's (2022) Finnish study include a measure of inciting or failing to condemn physical attacks against opposition members.…”

“…Often, researchers default to making these claims when they find that the majority of a certain subgroup in the dataset -respondents ideologically congruent with a candidate (Saikkonen and Christensen 2022) or those aligned with a candidate's policies (Gidengil, Stolle, and Bergeron-boutin 2021) -still support the undemocratic candidate. However, if we are making claims that a voting population is unable to meaningfully punish undemocratic behaviour and place a democracy at risk of (further) backsliding then we need to qualitatively justify that that subgroup is sufficiently large and that the percentage remaining with an undemocratic candidate is sizable enough to keep that candidate from losing.…”

Democratic Support as Truism: Ordinary Citizens’ Vulnerability to Anti-democratic Temptations

“…Further sobering findings emerge from a new experimental paradigm to study voting behavior (Graham and Svolik, 2020), which confronts respondents with the choice between two hypothetical candidates for political office with randomly varied attributes on traits, issue orientations, or violations of democratic norms. The common finding of this new body of research is that large majorities of citizens tolerate violations of a democratic norm if they receive policy payoffs in return (Carey et al, 2022;Saikkonen and Christensen, 2022;Simonovits et al, 2022). These studies led observers to conclude that "only about 3.5 Percent of Americans care about democracy" (Wood, 2020).…”

Citizens as a Democratic Safeguard? The Sequence of Sanctioning Elite Attacks on Democracy

“…First, it submits that research into citizens' perceptions and responses to elites undermining democracy should take the temporal dimension of democratic elections into account. A growing literature has begun to examine potential remedies against such undemocratic behavior and highlighted the role that citizens might play in averting such elite attacks on democracy (Graham and Svolik 2020;Gidengil, Stolle, and Bergeron-Boutin 2021;Grossman et al 2021;Svolik 2021;Wunsch, Jacob, and Derksen 2022;Frederiksen 2022;Simonovits, McCoy, and Littvay, Forthcoming;Saikkonen and Christensen 2022;Mazepus and Toshkov 2022;Carey et al 2020). Even though most of these studies draw rather pessimistic conclusions about as to whether citizens are ready to sanction undemocratic politicians from mainly survey experimental data, they usually refer to a segment in the electorate that would be willing to do so.…”

“…Closely related, while the bulk of research has focused on incumbent misconduct (Aarslew 2022;Simonovits, McCoy, and Littvay, Forthcoming) or neglected government status at all (Saikkonen and Christensen 2022;Wunsch, Jacob, and Derksen 2022;Graham and Svolik 2020), this paper jointly studies citizens' reactions to winning and losing (or incumbent and opposition) politicians. Specifically, I focus on an incumbent seizing control over an electoral commission and an opposition politician not conceding defeat.…”