Opposition Campaign Strategies and Voter Reactions in Democratic Backsliding

• In Event: Elite Behavior and Public Opinion in Eastern Europe

Abstract

How do opposition parties campaign in democratic backsliding? And how does this affect their electoral support? In this paper, I argue and empirically show that democratic backsliding leads opposition parties to adopt negative, anti-regime messaging – a strategy that is counterproductive for electoral victory as it appeals to radical opposition supporters but alienates the moderate majority. Even though opposition electoral victory is the necessary condition for reversing backsliding, the now large literature on democratic backsliding rarely focuses on opposition parties. In this paper, I investigate opposition parties’ electoral strategies to address this gap. In its first part, I show that opposition parties campaign with increasingly negative anti-regime messaging as democracy erodes. Using a large-scale, newly constructed dataset of opposition messaging on social media and a natural experimental design leveraging the incumbent’s staggered capture of regional media outlets in Hungary, I show that the incumbent’s control of the media, a central aspect of backsliding, leads opposition parties to employ more anti-regime rhetoric. As a second step, I demonstrate that this strategy is counterproductive for electoral victory: while rhetorical attacks appeal to radical, affectively polarized opposition supporters, the majority of citizens would prefer a more moderate, policy-focused campaign message from the opposition. To show this, I conduct an “opposition primary election” candidate-choice conjoint experiment in Hungary. My results imply that, once the incumbent starts to dismantle democracy, opposition parties may be pursing strategies that actively contribute to the consolidation of the backslider incumbent’s electoral dominance.

Author

• Hanna Folsz, Stanford University