Voices in the Void: What Does it Mean to Vote During Democratic Backsliding?

In recent decades, the world has seen an increasing number of democracies backsliding toward autocratic states. While this may not much affect those who endorse the autocratic leader, it may affect those who want to maintain or restore democracy in their countries in paramount ways. As democratic backsliding often occurs through unfair elections, in which access to media and campaigns possibilities are unfairly distributed among candidates or parties, voting plays a central role in this process. Therefore, we investigate to what extent losing or winning an unfair election affects (a) democratic attitudes and (b) citizens’ understanding of what voting means. To study this, we rely on a three-wave panel survey fielded two months before, shortly before and the day after the 2022 parliamentary election in Hungary, an election won by the incumbent party Fidesz who notoriously put the country on a path to democratic backsliding. We demonstrate how the winning or losing status can inhibit individual assessments of democratic quality within an illiberal democratic context: by highlighting the role of citizens’ conceptualizations of voting, this paper contributes to the literature on the origins of the winner-loser gap and addresses important individual-level differences that have been overlooked so far.