Explaining Public Support for Democratic Erosion: Trade-offs or Divergent Understandings of Democracy?

In contexts of democratic backsliding, citizens represent the last bulwark against the systematic dismantling of checks and balances by overbearing executives. And yet, the record of citizens pushing back against executive aggrandizement is mixed at best, with authoritarian-leaning leaders repeatedly confirmed in office in multiple countries. This tendency is puzzling: what drives citizens in established democracies to endorse political leaders who advocate a programme of democratic erosion? We leverage a conjoint survey experiment in Hungary to probe two alternative explanations why citizens choose undemocratic leaders. On the one hand, voters may engage in value trade-offs between the preservation of democratic procedures and alternative benefits they expect from a political leader in the form of economic buy-outs or cultural conservatism. On the other hand, distinct conceptions of democracy, most notably in the form of majoritarian or egalitarian understandings, may lead citizens to overlook violations of liberal democracy. Our findings indicate that while direct trade-offs are most prevalent among economically weak as well as rural respondents, a considerable share of our sample holds non-liberal understandings of democracy that lead them to overlook leaders’ preferences to undermine judicial independence. This signals that democratic attitudes among the citizenry represent an important vulnerability exposing a political system to democratic erosion where such a lack of liberal democratic commitment meets authoritarian-leaning elites. Our study feeds into broader debates on the role and limitations of citizens when it comes to countering trends of democratic backsliding.