Elite-Cues and Democratic Backsliding

• In Event: Poster Session: Predicting Political Preferences & Civic Engagement
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Predicting Political Preferences

Abstract

The literature on democratic backsliding has found that while voters do express disapproval of undemocratic behavior, it tends to be overshadowed by their allegiance to co-partisans’ politicians. Even when presented with clear and somewhat stylized instances of undemocratic behavior by hypothetical politicians, respondents are mostly unwilling to vote for the democratic opposition. I propose that while sanctioning of undemocratic does occur, it is more limited in the real world compared to what we capture with current experiments, because duly elected autocrats seldom openly admit to subverting democracy as they do in our current experiments. Ironically instead, elected autocrats often justify undemocratic behavior by presenting themselves as protectors of democracy, or at least as supporters of democracy. Building on the literature, I hypothesize that these justifications positively influence how tolerant co-partisans’ voters are of democratic transgressions by either cueing trade-offs consideration or by changing how democratic the incumbent is perceived. I consider various cues previously used to justify undemocratic policy in diverse contexts, such as the United States Poland, and Hungary. I test my arguments in an original survey-experiment fielded in the United States. The results provide insights into what arguments proponents of democracy should develop effective counters too and further the literature by heeding recent calls to create more realistic studies of backsliding.

Author

• Mathias Falkvist, Aarhus University