Democratic lip service? Conceptions of democracy and support for illiberal politicians

In light of recent developments of democratic backsliding, scholars are increasingly concerned why citizens are willing to support politicians that undermine liberal democracy. Previous studies have shown that many citizens trade off the protection of democratic principles against partisan and policy interests. These studies do not assume, however, that people only pay lip service to democracy and support illiberal politicians because they agree with their ideas about how democracy should work. In this study, we argue that citizens’ support for politicians is also motivated by a polity congruence between citizens’ and politicians’ conceptions of democracy. More specifically, we hypothesize that if citizens consider certain procedures as important to democracy and politicians use these procedures to implement their proposals, citizens are more likely to support these politicians. We test these assumptions using a pre-registered factorial survey experiment on citizens’ support for politicians’ proposals embedded in a two-wave survey in Germany. While we find only limited evidence that technocratic and populist attitudes matter, citizens with majoritarian and illiberal conceptions of democracy are less likely to punish politicians who bypass the judiciary and parliament to implement their proposals. In contrast, supporters of the representative conception of democracy are both proponents and guardians of the parliament as the core decision-making institution. These findings highlight the importance of considering citizens’ conceptions of democracy when analyzing procedural preferences that are relevant to maintaining or undermining liberal principles and democratic institutions.