Qualified democrats

Democratic Understandings and Democratic

Resilience
Ordinary citizens and democratic
backsliding
• Ordinary citizens in democracies rather unwilling to sanction transgressions of
democratic norms.
• Even though high levels of „support for democracy in the abstract“.

• Puzzle: If democracy is so popular, how can it be in trouble?

• Answer:
• High support for democracy needs to be “qualified”.
• Democratic understandings vary considerably within the citizenry.
• Deeper values which stand behind such support vary as well.
• It is only through those understandings and beliefs that citizens orient themselves towards the
democratic process and its elites (cognitive dimension).
Reseach-questions
• What is the importance of democratic understandings on the sides of
citizens for the phenomenon of democratic backsliding?
• Focus on intrinsic vs. instrumental understandings.

• What is the importance of deeper value-orientations?

• Focus on emancipative values

• (What drives these understandings?)

Trading-off Democracy?
Instrumental vs. Procedural Understandings and Democratic Backsliding

• Citizens support for democracy is highly conditional.

• Citizens are less willing to punish undemocratic behavior by

• Co-partisans
• Incumbents/Winners
• Candidates which are in line with their favored policy/their ideology
• Competent candidates

• Support seems to be rather instrumentally motivated.

Trading-off Democracy?
Instrumental vs. Procedural Understandings and Democratic Backsliding

• Qualification of democratic support: „intrinsic“ vs. „instrumental“ understandings of

democracy

• Instrumental understandings: supply of socioeconomic and political goods.

• Instrinsic understandings: attribute intrinsic value to democracy and the realization
of its principles.

• Instrumental democrats should be more willing to “trade-off” democracy for policy,

partisanship and office.
• Are intrinsic democrats unwilling to trade democracy off? Or only less?
• Vulnerability among the citizenry with regard to undemocratic actors.
Design I
• Observational study: Instrinsic vs. Instrumental understandings
• Do intrinsic vs. instrumental understandings moderate the winner-loser-gap in
support for democratic norms? (GBSII-Data)

• Observational study: Emancipative values

• Do emancipative values lead to less positive and more negative partisanship
towards anti-pluralist actors? How strong is this relationship compared to the
effect of a intrinsic understanding of democracy? Are supporters of anti-
pluralist parties more instrumental? (WEVS- and Vparty-Data)
Design II: Integration
• Survey-Experiment: Candidate-Choice Experiment
• Choose between 2 Candidate-Vignettes
• Behavior: democratic/neutral/undemocratic
• Policy: congruent/non-congruent
• Success: win/loss (margin of victory?)
• Partisanship: co-partisan/no co-partisan

• UV’s
• Democratic understandings: intrinsic, instrumental, authoritarian, (majoritarian)
• Emancipative values?
Emancipative values and democratic
backsliding
• Some scholars argue that the true driver of support for (liberal)
democracy and pro-democratic action lies in emancipative values.

• Qualifiaction of democratic support: emancipative values.

• Reflect a deeper commitment to the basic values which constitute liberal
democracy.

• Emancipation-minded people are argued to be active supporters of

democracy, critical democrats and less willing to trade democracy off.
Emancipative values and democratic
backsliding
• Following these authors, emancipative values should be the strongest
source of opposition to „anti-pluralist“ actors and undemocratic
behavior by political elites.

• They should also lead citizens to adopt less instrumental

understandings of democracy.

• Strong emancipative values among the citizenry should therefore be a

source of resilience against democratic backsliding.