Constraining Political Leaders: Citizen Support for Accountability Mechanisms

• In Event: Voters and Democratic Backsliding

Abstract

One of the most persistent problems of a democratic political system is that it requires delegating power to the government through elections on the one hand and making sure this government does not abuse this power on the other. In the words of James Madison (1788): “In framing a government to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Checks and balances and other accountability mechanisms are key mechanisms constraining governments (Lührmann et al. 2020). The process of democratic backsliding (Waldner and Lust 2018) that unfolded over the last two decades in new and old democracies has cast doubt on the robustness of these constraints on executive power. Democratically elected governments and leaders with authoritarian tendencies have used their tenures to gradually undermine institutions: curb the independence of courts, expand the powers and terms of presidents, and constrain the role of parliaments (Boese 2022). These developments suggest that politicians can get rid of the constraints on power with the popular mandate.
One of the main questions arising from the debate about democratic backsliding relates to the popular responses to these developments. Should we worry that citizens do not care about constraining the power of political authorities? As attacks on other democratic checks and balances are carried out across political systems, this article aims to 1) investigate to what extent the support for specific democratic rules is unconditional (do citizens regard accountability mechanisms as inherently valuable?) 2) whether citizens prioritize different checks and balances under different political conditions (to what extent are preferences for accountability mechanisms shaped by the institutional context?) and 3) test whether they trade them off for (policy) gains or actually want to empower in-party authorities committing democratic transgressions (to what extent are citizens supportive of infringements when their preferred party is in power and the government is pursuing policies they endorse?) (Mazepus and Toshkov 2022).
We compare citizens in different political systems that have experienced different levels of democratic backsliding. This paper uses experiments with large quota-based samples of citizens in three different countries: a two-party presidential system (USA, N = 1600), a multi-party parliamentary system based on proportional representation with some semi-presidential features (Poland, N = 1600), and a consociational parliamentary system based on proportional representation (Netherlands, N = 2000) (Lijphart 1999). All three countries have attracted some attention in debates about democratic backsliding and about populist challenges to established institutions.
The paper discusses the findings of the observational data and the pre-registered between-subject survey experiment testing the effects of different factors on the approval of a political authority (evaluation, support, trust, justifiability of actions, and willingness to protest). The vignette experiment uses a factorial design: 2 (in- vs. out-party) x 2 (endorsed policy vs. no endorsed policy) x 4 (no democratic violation x limiting the right to protest in the name of policy effectiveness x limiting the right to protest against the government in general x increasing the decree powers of the government).
Our first results show that even in systems considered as stable liberal democracies such as the Netherlands, there are large differences between voters of different parties in their attitudes towards constraints on protests, leaders, the government, and even suffrage rights. We analyze the factors shaping popular support for accountability mechanisms and both individual and cross-country differences in support for checks and balances. We reflect on the implications of our findings for the debate about the stability of democracies and the significance of popular opinion to regime stability.

References
Boese, V. A., Alizada, N., Lundstedt, M., Morrison, K., Natsika, N., Sato, Y., … & Lindberg, S. I. (2022). ‘Autocratization Changing Nature?’. V-Dem Democracy Report 2022, https://v-dem.net/media/publications/dr_2022.pdf
Lijphart, A. (1999), Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lührmann, A., K.L. Marquardt, and V. Mechkova (2020). ‘Constraining governments: New indices of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal accountability’. American Political Science Review, 114: 3, 811-820.
Mazepus, H., & Toshkov, D. (2022). Standing up for democracy? Explaining citizens’ support for democratic checks and balances. Comparative Political Studies, 55(8), 1271-1297.
Waldner, D., & Lust, E. (2018). Unwelcome change: Coming to terms with democratic backsliding. Annual Review of Political Science, 21, 93-113.

Authors

• Honorata Mazepus, Leiden University

• G. Magnus Feldmann, University of Bristol