Committing to Democracy: How to make citizens reject undemocratic candidates

Citizens in Western democracies often accept undemocratic behavior if they stand to gain from it politically. How can we prevent people from acting this way? Existing approaches have tried to improve democratic commitments by telling people what is right and wrong through external inputs—typically specific pieces of persuasive information, correction, or message—with mixed success. This study departs from such approaches and employs a Socratic strategy of making people realize on their own that they are not acting according to their values in an extensive survey experiment in the United States with a representative sample of 6000 respondents. The experimental design asks people to write a short public essay on whether standing firm on democratic principles or winning politically is most important to them and how they plan to act accordingly. The experimental design then confronts respondents with a series of elections with two candidates: an undemocratic candidate they agree with politically and a regular candidate they disagree with politically to see the extent to which they are willing to reject the undemocratic candidate from their side. Each respondent is re-interviewed after 1, 2, 4, or 8 weeks to examine the persistence of the effects. Results demonstrate that the commitment treatment has statistically significant, substantial, and long-lasting effects in reducing peoples’ susceptibility to vote for undemocratic candidates. These results provide important implications for preventing undemocratic behavior in our democracies today.