Building Tolerance for Backsliding by Trash-Talking Democracy in Mexico

• In Event: Learning from Global Democratic Challenges and Innovations Mini-Conference I: Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies II: Political and Civil Society

Abstract

When aspiring autocrats erode their democracies, why do voters not necessarily turn against them? A prominent answer focuses on the advantages to these leaders of electorates that are polarized along partisan lines. We offer another answer. Aspiring autocrats can also maintain popular support by degrading their democracies in the eyes of their citizens. If voters can be induced to believe that their democracy is already broken, then the leader’s attacks matter less. This is the logic behind backsliders’ strategy of trash-talking democracy. Using text-as-data methods, we distinguish polarizing statements from democracy-denigrating ones in the rhetoric of one contemporary aspiring autocrat, Mexico’s Andrés López Obrador. We report on a survey experiment, being piloted in Mexico, that allow us to assess the effectiveness of democracydenigrating speech on the public’s tolerance of democratic erosion.

Authors

• Lautaro Cella, University of Chicago

• Ipek Cinar, University of Chicago

• Susan C. Stokes, University of Chicago

• Andres Uribe, Stanford University