Delegating away or trading off democracy? Procedural and instrumental understandings of democracy and citizens willingness to tolerate its erosion

Recent research depicts a critical role of ordinary citizens in the currently witnessable process of democratic erosion around the globe. Democracy’s citizens are reported to tolerate undemocratic behavior by political elites or support the erosion of accountability mechanisms in exchange for different kinds of gains (Singer 2018; Graham und Svolik 2020; Saikkonen und Christensen 2021). The literature reports citizens to be willing to exchange democracy for policy, ideology, governmental power, governmental and economic performance and due to polarization. Confronted with this rather conditional support for democracy the question emerges what drivers lie behind citizens willingness to tolerate undemocratic behavior, or rather which citizens are willing to “trade democracy off”. One potential source of such willingness may lie in the understandings citizens hold of the term “democracy” (Lu und Chu 2021; Wunsch et al. 2022). These represent the measures people use to evaluate, support or reject political systems and to act politically in them (Osterberg-Kaufmann et al. 2020). Research on meanings and understandings of democracy has time and time again found “instrumental” understandings of democracy to be widespread, even within established democracies. Such instrumental, rather than intrinsic or principled understandings of democracy, are argued to value democracy for its ability to deliver favored goods, policies and different kinds of governmental or economic performance. Yet, while this assumption has been held for quite some time, it has not been explicitly tested, especially with regard to the currently witnessable gradual erosion of democracy from within and citizens reported willingness to tolerate undemocratic behavior. To answer the question if instrumental democrats are more willing to trade democracy off than principled democrats, and for which gains, this paper leverages comparative survey-data of the Global Barometer Survey II and the Asia Barometer Survey IV. Based on these data-sources, the paper investigates instrumental democrats’ willingness to support the erosion of accountability mechanisms measured via survey-items. Based on its findings, the paper comes to the conclusion that instrumental democrats are in fact more willing to exchange gains or outputs for support for executive extensions of power, but not for all gains alike. Furthermore, it calls into question the exclusively positive role that has been associated with procedural democrats.