Hypocritical Democrats: Citizens’ Conditional Commitment to Democratic Norms and Principles

Recent studies have attempted to reveal citizens’ true commitment to democratic norms and principles. We contribute to this strand of literature by analyzing how out-group biases may shift citizens’ preferences away from core democratic norms and principles. Specifically, we focus on citizens’ commitment to protecting the rights of minorities, protecting people from hate speech, and promoting political equality using quotas. To capture citizens’ general preferences about these principles we first employ original survey items that leverage a trade-off framing that pits these principles and norms against other incompatible democratic principles. Next, we randomly relate these norms and principles to particular groups (e.g., women, migrants, homosexuals, historical cultural minorities, Muslims…) that respondents may like or dislike. This reinforces the intrinsic tension that each trade-off involves and allows us to probe on the conditionality of citizens’ commitment to these key democratic principles. The results of these analyses, based on an original survey fielded in 15 European countries, reveal that respondents’ commitment to protecting the rights of minorities, protecting people from hate speech and promoting political equality using quotas is conditional on the extent to which they like or dislike the out-group these principles and norms are related to. This paper contributes to debates surrounding support for democracy by revealing the conditional and contradictory nature of citizens’ commitment to democratic norms and principles, and points to the existence of a category of citizens we deem as hypocritical democrats.