Do citizens care more about deliberative values than electoral democracy? An analysis of public attitudes to democratic norm violations in four countries.
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Democratic scholarship maintains a consensus that rhetoric targeted at undermining free and fair elections is more threatening to democracy than transgressions of deliberative values. However, whether citizens democratic alarm systems are wired this way remains empirically untested. We explore this question using a preregistered survey experiment with 5,303 respondents across the US, England, Germany, and Italy. Our central finding is that citizens are significantly more disapproving of deliberative norm violations than of threats to electoral democracy's core institutions. Our findings are consistent across countries and experimental variations in actor-contexts, where we test citizens' attitudes to norm violations by three distinct actors: candidates, legislators, and journalists. Exploring our findings by the attitudinal profile of respondents, we find that those with more populist attitudes are more likely to be tolerant of electoral democracy violations and intolerant of deliberative violations. These results have significant implications for understanding public resistance to democratic backsliding.
Institutions: University College Dublin, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7204661966
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