Democracy as Truism? Ideological and Generational Divides in Citizens’ Commit-ment to Liberal Democracy

Results from recent studies have cast doubt on ordinary citizens’ commitment to democracy. On the one hand, survey items explicitly asking respondents about their support for democracy have been criticized for their inability to detect the authoritarian predispositions that often lurk behind such nominal declarations of democratic adherence (Kiewiet de Jonge, 2016). On the other, experimental designs show that citizens rarely stick to an unconditional defence of liberal- democratic principles when they stand under pressure and faced with trade-off situations (e.g. Graham and Svolik (2020); Simonovits et al. (2022)). According to (Wuttke, 2022), this is evidence that ‘[g]eneric support for the abstract notion of democracy is strong but substantive support for its underlying components is weak’ (p. 6). To test the validity of Wuttke’s hypothesis and to try to identify the different varieties of ‘democrats with adjectives’ (Schedler and Sarsfield, 2007), I conduct a cluster analysis with data from the latest ESS Round 10, which contains a battery of questions gauging different conceptions of democracy as well as populist and illiberal attitudes (‘The will of the people cannot be stopped’, ‘It is acceptable to have a strong leader above the law’) towards the democratic system. This allows me to give a cross-country, descriptive picture of the share of the population falling within each category, which should prove relevant to help determine how widespread diffuse support for liberal democracy is in Europe. Finally, in an attempt to delineate the profile of each group of ‘democrats with adjectives’, I perform a multinomial multilevel regression model with the obtained clusters as the dependent variable and a set of political (trust, satis- faction, and perceptions of internal efficacy) and sociodemographic variables as predictors.