Democratic Distrust, not Authoritarianism: Tolerating the Exclusion of Adversaries

Within current debates on “the global crisis of democracy” (Diamond 2019), one puzzle has been gripping the attention of politicians, citizens, and scholars alike: why do democratic voters support nondemocratic governments? That is, why do voters who declare themselves democratic support governments that disregard democratic values and institutions and often end up damaging democracy in small or big ways? Much of the relevant literature conceives citizen support for “democratic backsliding” (Bermeo 2016) as a problem of values. Citizens support authoritarian leaders, it suggests, either because they hold authoritarian values, or because they hold democratic values in weak manner only and are willing to trade them off against higher goods like material wellbeing or moral purity. In this study, we conduct an online pre-election survey among US citizens (November 2024, N = 2,700) to explore an alternative explanation: basic democratic distrust. Citizens, we hypothesize, may be willing to constrain the rights and liberties of their adversaries, not because they do not value democracy, but because they believe it to be threatened by their adversaries. In addition, we will explore the bidirectional relation between democratic distrust and negative emotions: Does “affective polarization” drive the perception of others as “enemies of democracy,” or is it the other way round, with distrust generating emotions like hate and anger? Note: I could not register yet the co-author of the paper, Alexander Bor (bora@ceu.edu)