The Demand Side of Democratic Backsliding: How Divergent Understandings of Democracy Shape Political Choice

Abstract

Why do citizens in democracies fail to punish political candidates who openly violate democratic standards at the ballot box? The bulk of existing research assumes that a common understanding of democracy underpins citizens’ evaluations of different candidates, resulting in a trade-off between undemocratic practices and partisan or economic considerations. We shed doubt on this assumption by showing that divergent understandings of democracy coexist among citizens and affect vote choice. We leverage a novel approach to estimate individual-level citizen commitment to democracy by means of a candidate choice conjoint experiment in Poland, a country experiencing democratic backsliding in a context of deep polarization. We find support for our claim that respondents with less clear-cut liberal democratic attitudes not only tolerate democratic violations more readily, but do so irrespective of a given candidate’s partisan affiliation. Thus, we contend that a lack of attitudinal consolidation around liberal democratic norms explains continued voter support for authoritarian-leaning leaders.

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

“…While cases of blatant attacks on democratic institutions-such as refusing concession or hijacking electoral commissions-will likely be observed by most citizens, it is less clear if they necessarily consider such behavior undemocratic. Whereas Graham and Svolik (2020) show that most U.S. citizens detect attacks on democratic norms, Wunsch, Jacob, and Derksen (2022) find in the context of Poland that diverging understandings of democracy are strongly associated with evaluating whether actions intending to undermine democratic principles are democratic or not.…”

“…Several studies have built on this mechanism and sought to test citizens' readiness to withdraw electoral support from politicians who have shown undemocratic conduct in public office. Most of these works have leveraged candidate choice experiments (Graham and Svolik 2020;Frederiksen 2022;Wunsch, Jacob, and Derksen 2022;Carey et al 2020), in which, along with party affiliation and policy platform, political candidates may propose undemocratic reforms or have supported (but not directly committed) them in the past. Based on several choices between such candidate profiles, these studies infer the extent to which voters are willing to abandon undemocratic politicians.…”

“…Given that the most prominent cases of backsliding in the last decade are characterized by intense polarization (McCoy, Rahman, and Somer 2018;McCoy and Somer 2019), according to this approach, voters will most likely fail to contain elite attempts to undermine democracy. Yet others hold that other factors such as candidate competence (Frederiksen 2022) and citizens' perceptions of what democracy constitutes (Wunsch, Jacob, and Derksen 2022) feed into voter support for undemocratic politicians.…”

“…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.…”