Democratic Feedback: The eroding impact of national amendments to minority rights on political culture

The protection of minority rights is of fundamental importance to liberal democracy, although existing literature has tended to focus disproportionately on other democratic principles. This is surprising given that the disregard of minority rights persists in advanced liberal democracies, along various dimensions of discrimination and socio-political disparity, in contrast to most other democratic principles. I address this aperture by re-evaluating the political values and beliefs of citizens. The few studies that have previously done so have employed a static approach focused on explaining stable individual-level explanatory factors. While valuable for their insights, these studies rely on procedures that might fail to capture the sudden—and at times drastic—fluctuations that have come to define modern political culture. I contribute to the literature by bringing an often overlooked agent into the picture—the state. Doing so allows me to evaluate the interplay between supply and demand-side interchanges to offer a more dynamic model of citizens’ support for protecting the rights of minorities. Theoretically, I draw on the thermostatic model originally developed to explain how citizens signal to policymakers when more or less policy is warranted and how policymakers react accordingly, and adapt it to explain support for and the implementation of minority rights. Empirically, I then test this model in Switzerland by using a factorial vignette to leverage real-world referenda to underscore how the expression of popular sovereignty can either defend the rights of minorities, or trample over them. Using this methodological instrument allows me to manipulate respondents’ perceptions of the degree to which minority rights are protected in their country. While I find evidence of having successfully manipulated appraisals of the degree to which minority rights are protected (i.e., the independent variable), this does not impact support for the protection of minority rights (i.e., the dependent variable) as expected. Instead of the negative feedback loop that my model would suggest, in which less protection on the supply side is met with more support for protection on the demand side, and vice versa, I find an asymmetrical negative feedback loop: Perceiving more protection of minority rights has no impact on citizens’ support for minority rights, while perceiving less protection of minority rights actually causes people to be less supportive of protecting the rights of minorities. This might reflect a sort of bias-reinforcing justification on the part of citizens, by which seeing a government place less importance on the protection of minority rights makes protecting minority rights appear less important, allowing for citizens to express their true preferences for neglecting minority rights. The implications of these findings are profound. They suggest not only that political culture is an insufficient bulwark against illiberal abuses of minorities by the government, but that citizens might—knowingly or not—abet aspiring democratic backsliders in dismantling the liberal facet of post-industrial democracies.