Citizen Support for Democracy and Undemocratic Practices

Abstract

This dissertation examines the puzzle of citizen support for undemocratic practices through three lenses, each explored in a distinct research article. These articles consider, respectively, the roles of partisanship, democratic trade-offs, and age in explaining support for undemocratic practices.

The first article begins with an empirical assessment of the subversion dilemma framework across three moderately polarized and multiparty systems. According to this perspective, individual support for undemocratic practices stems, at least partly, from increasingly negative perceptions of opposing partisans' commitment to democracy. The underlying mechanism argues that, in light of these misperceptions, the rational response is to turn to undemocratic practices to remain electorally and ideologically competitive. Using an expanded conceptualization of undemocratic practices, this first study tests the framework in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The results indicate that misperceptions of out-partisans' commitment to democracy do not substantively explain citizen support for democratic subversion in these three contexts. The results are found to be inconsistent across different types of undemocratic practices, raising questions about the generalizability of existing research between contexts and over an expanded understanding of the concept of undemocratic practices.

In the second article, I investigate the extent to which citizens are willing to trade different dimensions of democracy for better physical and material security. While existing studies on popular support for democratic backsliding have extensively focused on candidate choice experiments, these do not capture the extent to which individuals intrinsically value undemocratic alternatives. In the few studies that look beyond candidates and focus on support for undemocratic practices, results indicate a substantial willingness among citizens to disregard democracy for better economic and physical conditions. Building on these findings, I test the willingness to trade five different dimensions of democracy for better physical and material security (i.e., stronger economy and lower crime rates). The objective is to understand whether citizens' preferences for different dimensions/institutions of democracy shape their willingness to engage in democratic trade-offs. Using a pre-registered conjoint experiment in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, I demonstrate that citizens are less willing to compromise on elections and political rights, but more open to forgo accountability mechanisms. These findings make a substantial contribution to the literature on citizen support for democratic backsliding by identifying which dimensions of democracy people are least (and most) likely to abandon.

In the third and final article of this dissertation, I shift my focus to a demographic variable: age. More specifically, this research is interested in understanding whether and to what extent younger citizens' disconnect with democracy is fueling a shift towards undemocratic practices. I rely on a multi-method approach to examine differences in democratic attitudes across age groups. Using observational and experimental data, I provide robust cross-national evidence that younger citizens' support for democracy is substantially lower than older citizens. Building on these findings, I further demonstrate that youth are far more tolerant of a wide range of undemocratic practices and democratic norm violations. Lastly, I present the results of a conjoint experiment which confirms that younger citizens have significantly lower preferences for democratic societal attributes when compared to their older counterparts. Substantively, these findings contribute to a growing literature on the vulnerability of consolidated democracies to younger peoples' shifting attitudes towards democratic institutions and norms.