Paying lip-service to democracy? Citizen support for autocratization in European democracies

Democratic erosion appears to be increasingly common around the world, visible in even long-standing democracies like the United States, and European democracies like Poland and Hungary (Bermeo 2016, Waldner and Lust 2018, Luhrmann and Lindberg 2019). In explaining these processes of democratic erosion and authoritarian backsliding, scholars predominantly emphasize the role of political elites, leaving the role of citizens in supporting autocratization relatively under-examined (Bermeo 2016, Waldner and Lust 2018). At the same time, a persistent problem in research on citizen support for democracy in established democracies suggests contradictory findings: high levels of support for democracy as an ideal political system combined with much lower levels of satisfaction with the way democracy functions in practice, and seemingly rising levels of support for authoritarian alternatives (Ferrin and Kriesi 2016, Foa and Mounk 2016, van Ham et al. 2017), or at least a willingness to prioritize partisan goals over democracy or even re-define what democracy means in partisan ways (Graham and Svolik 2020, Krishnarajan 2022). A persistent problem in this research literature is therefore that we don’t really know whether people are paying lip-service to democracy or whether they genuinely support it, nor the extent to which support for democracy might actually be conditional and context-dependent. This paper addresses these questions by asking under what circumstances citizens are willing to suspend democracy, what concrete actions that erode democracy do they consider acceptable in these circumstances, and whether they consider suspension of democracy to be acceptable only temporarily or indefinitely. The paper especially zooms in on a variety of crisis conditions (economic, climate, pandemic, and others) and asks what specific actions citizens consider acceptable or not under these varying circumstances. The paper uses a novel survey with newly created survey items that attempt to uncover under what conditions citizens are willing to suspend democracy; for how long individuals are willing to suspend democracy; and which constituent elements of democracy citizens are willing to suspend. The survey was conducted in January 2022 in four countries: Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Poland. The paper examines both individual-level and contextual-level predictors of support for democratic suspension, analysing the role of respondents’ political attitudes and socio-economic characteristics, as well as the role of authoritarian legacies on different generations of respondents.