Social Norms and Voting for Democracy

I examine how citizens who observe altered democratic norms change their willingness to electorally punish undemocratic candidates for office, thereby shifting the effectiveness and long-term stability of electoral accountability within democracies. The project begins with a game theoretic model of political competition that integrates norms. This is followed by an experiment that allows me to test the model’s empirical predictions and facilitates structural estimation of key model parameters. I utilize an online survey conducted in the United Kingdom to elicit two types of social norms from respondents: injunctive norms, i.e., beliefs about what others consider to be acceptable behavior, and descriptive norms, i.e., beliefs about the actions of others. In a subsequent experiment, respondents are randomly exposed to information on the choices made in the first survey, which is intended to shift perceptions over democratic norms. Following this manipulation, respondents take part in a candidate-choice conjoint experiment in which respondents indicate which of two politicians they would vote for in a series of hypothetical elections. Moreover, this research design is shaped by qualitative interviews that inform the accuracy of the formal model and frames the experiment.