Democratic Transgressions Embedded in Reality

Research on citizens and democratic backsliding has skyrocketed over the past decade. Most of this research has focused on why citizens might tolerate hypothetical undemocratic behavior carried out in the abstract by hypothetical actors. We present a theoretical framework and use a two-wave panel survey from six challenged democracies (the United States, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, and India) to assess the consequences of this approach. In the first wave, we develop an alternative survey instrument based on real-world democratic transgressions and compare support for such transgressions to typical hypothetical behaviors. In the second wave, we construct an intervention to compare how easily support for real-world transgressions is moved vis-à-vis support for hypothetical transgressions. Our results show that support for real-world undemocratic behaviors is substantially higher but also easier to intervene against. We therefore question two core findings of existing research: that citizens on balance oppose undemocratic behaviors and that interventions against undemocratic behavior often are ineffective.