Committing to Democracy: How to make citizens reject undemocratic candidates

In Western democracies, citizens often accept undemocratic behavior if they stand to gain politically. Existing studies have attempted to counter such behavior by informing citizens why safeguarding democracy is important through various approaches, with mixed success. This study advances an alternative approach. Instead of telling people how to think, it asks citizens what they find most important between democracy and politics and how they plan to act accordingly. Given that most citizens already hold deep democratic values, this Socratic approach extracts voluntary commitments from citizens to prioritize democratic principles over political preferences, which provides them with a strong intrinsic motivation to act accordingly. Utilizing this approach in an original survey experiment in the United States with a representative sample of 6000 respondents, the experimental design randomly distributes respondents into either a control, information, or commitment group and subsequently assesses their willingness to prioritize democracy over politics in a series of fictive elections. Results demonstrate that the democratic commitment approach significantly and substantially reduces peoples’ susceptibility to vote for undemocratic candidates compared to the control and information groups. These results offer important insights and a new way of thinking when designing strategies for empowering citizens to reject undemocratic politicians in today’s democracies.