Mapping and Strengthening Citizen Commitment to Democracy

The ongoing wave of democratic deconsolidation has refuelled scholarly interest in the societal pillars of liberal democracy. These studies show that most citizens endorse democratic ideas in the abstract but only a minority of the population is willing to stand up for this system when it is under assault. Against the backdrop of fragile commitment to liberal democracy and ongoing attempts of anti-system entrepreneurs to capitalize on these weaknesses, this manuscript of a grant proposal to the German Research Foundation 1) reconceptualizes and systematically maps citizen commitment to democracy and 2) examines what can be done to fortify citizen commitment to liberal democracy. In a first step, the project will map orientations towards democracy. It departs from the insight that politics is not a priority in the everyday life of most ordinary citizens (van Deth 2000). Therefore, many citizens hold may weak, barely developed political attitudes – particular with respect to abstract, remote and complex topics such as the institutional design of a political system. Proposing “commitment to democracy” as a two-dimensional reconceptualization of “political support for democracy” (Easton 1975), this project considers both whether citizens in established democracies hold positive and whether they hold strong attitudes towards the political system they live in. The goal of Work Package I is to develop new measurement techniques for identifying the share of committed or fragile democrats and committed or fragile anti-democrats and explore the correlates of individual differences in commitment to democracy. Public opinion research has established that weak attitudes rarely translate into behavior and are susceptible to persuasive influences. Hence, a prevalence of weak commitment to democracy helps explain why democracy-related considerations rarely affect vote choices (Graham/Svolik 2020) but also offers opportunities for bolstering the role of citizens as safeguards of democracy. Acknowledging that political entre-preneurs strategically utilize citizens’ weak and malleable system preferences, this project seeks to investigate theory-guided and actionable counterstrategies. Taking a deliberately normative stance in favour of democratic self-governance, this project proposes and tests ‘democratic persuasion’ as a practical intervention to pre-vent citizens with vague grudges against democracy from becoming committed anti-democrats and to turn fragile into committed democrats that are willing to stand up this system of government. Work Package II investigates the question of what kind of messages, argument and interventions succeed in promoting citizen commitment to democracy. Extending promising findings from pilot studies (Wuttke/Foos 2021), in a set of cross-national survey experiments, we explore how different kinds of arguments for liberal democracy, conveyed with different messaging styles have varying effects for citizen commitment to democracy in different contexts and among recipients with different predispositions. Having identified the most effective messaging to bolster citizen commitment to democracy, the magnitude of persuasive effects will be explored using field experiments in natural environments on social media platforms. The overall goal is to advance academic knowledge of the nature and malleability of citizen commitment to democracy and to actionable blueprints for those educators and political actors who are interested in fostering democracy.