Effects of coalitional cues on evaluations of reforms altering checks and balances

Are reforms altering checks and balances evaluated differently depending on who proposes them? Coalitional affiliation is associated with how much importance citizens assign to different aspects of democracy: the winners of elections value elections more, while the losers of elections value constraints on executive power and opposition rights more (Mazepus & Toshkov 2021). Moreover, there is growing evidence that citizens in democracies evaluate violations of checks and balances differently depending on which party is responsible for them (e.g., Graham & Svolik 2020). Thus, just like other markers of coalition, political identity can drive citizens’ evaluations of information and their perceptions of objective facts (e.g., Leeper & Slothuus 2014). But why would this be the case? And should we expect that political identity affects evaluations of all proposals coming from the ruling elites? I study two complementary explanations of why citizens who declare high support for democracy vary in their evaluations of reforms of checks and balances. First, I focus on the role of *perceived motivations* and test if coalitional cues influence what motivations citizens assign to the reformers. Following the reasoning that ‘The intentions of people on our team are pure; those of the out-group are not’ (Sloman & Rabb 2019), I expect that the losers of elections will be more suspicious of the intentions of the reformers. If an individual supports the coalition in charge, they will assign more benign intentions to the government proposing the reform: ensuring independence of judges, strengthening democracy and the rule of law. If an individual opposes the coalition in charge, they will assign more malicious intentions: undermining democracy, trying to get rid of the constraints on power. Second, I focus on *the stakes* involved in reforms and test whether coalitional cues affect evaluations of all types of reform proposals. Thus, I investigate whether political identity activates motivated reasoning irrespective of the type of reform proposed or activates it only for high stakes reforms. I expect that the perception of being threatened by political rivals affects judgments of norm-eroding violations (Simonovits, McCoy, & Littvay 2021). As reforms altering checks and balances pose a threat to the election losers – their democratic rights might be constrained – the stakes in such reforms are high. We should therefore observe that coalitional cues have a larger effect on the perceived motivations of the reformers targeting checks and balances than domains that do not pose a direct threat to either coalition. Empirically, I present the results of a pre-registered original survey experiment with a representative quota-based sample of Polish citizens (N = 1390). Using a mixed design, each participant was randomly assigned to a winning, losing or no coalition condition (between-subject) and evaluated four scenarios about proposed reforms (within-subject). Participants indicated perceived motivations (benign vs. malicious) of the reformers for three types of checks and balances reforms (changes to the appointments of judges, removal of the presidential term limit, and new rules for protest registration) and a reform with lower stakes (changing the deadline for income-tax declaration).