Pro-Democratic Norms Against Undemocratic Behavior

Why do citizens oppose undemocratic behavior, and would they do it to a greater extent if they learned co-citizens' reasons for doing so? In this paper, we deploy pro-democratic norms interventions in six countries through a two-step design. First, we measure citizens' (dis)approval of real-world undemocratic behaviors and their reasons for doing so in the United States, India, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and Mexico. Second, we treat other citizens of the same countries with the information obtained in the first step and examine the effects on support for undemocratic behaviors and actors. The project thus seeks to uncover citizens' reasons for supporting and opposing undemocratic behaviors and examine whether pro-democratic norms interventions work to combat anti-democratic tendencies. Beyond the overarching idea, this document presents preliminary results from the first step, which indicate that opposition to real-world undemocratic behavior is much lower than when using fictitious scenarios, while common reasons for opposing undemocratic behaviors are that they disrespect the will of voters, put well-functioning institutions at risk or manipulates them, and are often based on falsehoods. We find that our intervention can manipulate citizens' perception of social norms but rarely do citizens' change their own opinions about what is democratic or not.