Challenging Undemocratic Actions: When are Opposition Counter-Frames Effective?

Politicians frequently get away with undemocratic actions without voters sanctioning them. More direly, the existing experimental literature shows that the opposition are mostly ineffective in persuading voters to sanction undemocratic actions. On the other hand, comparative country evidence suggests that some opposition strategies are more effective than others. In this paper, I attempt to resolve these conflictual findings by arguing that counter-frames can be effective only if they specifically target the incumbents' justification for an undemocratic action. Firstly, I argue that, baked into the democratic systems, three broad principles can be used to justify undemocratic actions, all of which foster voter support through different mechanisms. Politicians can attempt to persuade the public that their action is democratic (a democratic principle), they can attempt to argue that the trade-off is necessary (an appositeness principle), and they can attempt to delegitimize the opposition against the action (an animosity principle). Secondly, I propose that counter-frames effectiveness is contingent on the original principle used to justify the undemocratic action. That is to say, principle-aligned counter-frames will be more effective than non-aligned counter-frames. To test this prediction, I propose an original survey experiment that relies on treatment sampled from a corpus of real-world pro- and counter-frames. In turn, this allowed me to create realistic vignettes. Furthermore, I follow the recent experimental literature, by developing a multi-vignette design so that every principle is captured in 12 different vignettes for both frame and counter-frame to capture the latent principle and not solely some iteration of it. The survey experiment only manipulates the context in which the counter-frames appear. Thus, importantly, there are no differences in the wording of the counter-frames between conditions, only to which principle and original frame they are in context to. This allows me to create a multidimensional survey experiment that can effectively capture the underlying dimensions of both the frame and counter-frames. The results will provide insights into how proponents of democracy can effectively rebuff undemocratic challengers and thus have both theoretical and practical relevance.