Which “Demos” Is Allowed to Criticize the Government?

• In Event: Systems of Exclusion and Belonging among Minorities

Abstract

In the context of diversifying societies due to migration and democratic backsliding in both new and established democracies, the possibility to voice critique becomes an ever more important indicator of a functioning democracy. Building on previous work on political tolerance in general and towards immigrants in particular, we investigate who is allowed to formulate critique of the government. We rely on an original survey experiment conducted in the United States in 2021 and replicated in Switzerland and Turkey as hard test cases.
In all three countries we find that majority group members show less political tolerance towards immigrants than citizens. We further argue that the key to understand contemporary backlash processes against democracy and civil liberties lies in the “demos”, the political community component of the compound word democracy, and not in the institutions and processes of democratic governance, i.e. the “kratos” component of democracy typically emphasized by scholars. In line with this assumption, we find evidence that those majority group members with an exclusive (ethnic) vision of the imagined political community, the demos, are more likely to be politically intolerant of immigrants than those who have a more inclusive (multicultural) understanding of the demos. This is consistently the case in the US, and evident in the other two countries suggesting that, in the eyes of majority group members, the ability to voice critique is primarily seen as a privilege reserved to perceived members of the demos and not shared with newcomers. These subjective and therefore flexible boundaries of the demos then determine who has the freedom to criticize the government and who does not.

Authors

• Mia Katharina Gandenberger, University of Neuchatel

• Alexandra Filindra, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Burcu Kolcak, Rutgers University

• Anita Manatschal, University of Neuchâtel