Empowering and constraining political authorities: Investigating citizens’ support for democratic accountability mechanisms under different conditions

One of the most persistent problems of democratic political systems is that it requires delegating power to the government through elections on the one hand and making sure this government does not abuse the power on the other. In the words of James Madison (1788): “In framing a government to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” The process of democratic backsliding (Waldner and Lust 2018) that unraveled over the last two decades in new and old democracies is closely linked to this difficulty. Democratically elected governments and leaders with authoritarian tendencies used their tenures to gradually undermine institutions: curb the independence of courts, expand the powers and terms of presidents, and constrain the role of parliaments (Boese 2022). These developments showed that politicians can get rid of the constraints on power with the popular mandate. Should we worry that citizens do not care about constraining the power of political authorities? As attacks on other democratic checks and balances are carried out across political systems (Alizada 2021), this article aims to 1) investigate to what extent the support for specific democratic rules is unconditional 2) whether citizens prioritize different checks and balances under different political conditions and 3) test whether they trade them off for (policy) gains or actually want to empower in-party authorities committing democratic transgressions. We compare citizens in different political systems that experienced different level of democratic backsliding. We use experiments with large quota-based samples of citizens in three different countries: two-party system (USA), multi-party proportional system (Poland), and consociational system (Netherlands). Our fist results show that even in systems considered as stable liberal democracies such as the Netherlands, there are large differences between voters of different parties in their attitudes towards constraints on protests, leaders, the government, and even suffrage rights. We reflect on the implications these results may have for our assumptions about the stability of democracies.