Trading off Liberal Democracy: Assessing Citizens' Tolerance of Democratic Backsliding

Recent studies suggest that citizens are unlikely to trade off free and fair elections for other socially desirable outcomes, such as greater security, economic growth, or higher incomes. However, while free elections are central to modern democracies, today democracy is not often undermined by abolishing free and fair elections. Our study shifts the focus to citizens’ and analyses the extent to which they would be willing to trade off higher incomes for the more granular principles and institutions that are undermined in democratic backsliding processes such as judicial independence, media freedom or horizontal accountability. Our main expectation is that while citizens may be unwilling to relinquish free elections, they may be more open to abandoning key liberal principles of democracy. This may explain why democratic backsliding, characterized by the erosion of specific liberal principles along with the preservation of elections, may be acceptable to some citizens. To test this expectation, we fielded a conjoint experiment in the United Kingdom, Poland, Hungary, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, and Israel. In the experiment respondents were asked to rate and choose among hypothetical countries that varied in their respect for different democratic principles. Building on recent advances in conjoint experiments we also included an additional attribute that captures the monthly income that respondents would enjoy in each country. The inclusion and randomization of this attribute allows us to analyse how citizens prioritize among democratic principles and what kind of trade-offs they are willing to make by estimating and comparing the monetary value that they attribute to each principle. In other words, by including income as an attribute, we can analyse variation in citizens’ willingness to pay to preserve each democratic principle using a comparable and intuitive metric across countries. The results indicate that while citizens do not give up on free elections easily, they are more elastic when it comes to the liberal principles and institutions at the heart of modern backsliding processes. In fact, the analysis reveals that in some countries a majority of citizens would be willing to forgo liberal principles such as freedom of association, freedom of speech and horizontal accountability in exchange for relatively small increases in their income. This is especially true when the liberal components of democracy are dismantled one by one, suggesting that a gradual or “piecemeal” approach to democratic backsliding is likely to be more effective. These results have important implications for our understanding of democratic backsliding and citizens’ willingness to resist it.