Competing Over Democracy: How Parties’ Strategic Use of Democracy Shapes Voters' Behavior.

Democracy long served as the rules of the game rather than the game itself. Bringing debates on democratic backsliding into the study of party competition, this paper argues that the fragmentation of democratic consensus on both the demand and the supply sides creates a political opportunity structure for parties to strategically mobilize democracy as a competitive resource. This paper makes the argument that when parties do so, they face two fundamental strategic choices: they can weaponize democracy outward against rivals or leverage it inward to bolster their own legitimacy. In this sense, democracy functions as a strategic resource, simultaneously an instrument of delegitimation and a tool of legitimation. I conceptualize this as the strategic repertoire of democracy, encompassing two complementary strategies: Democratic Denial (questioning opponents’ democratic credentials) and Democratic Overselling (amplifying one’s own). In this paper, I look more specifically at the effect of these democratic appeals on voters. Empirically, I rely on a novel dataset of political parties’ interventions in the medias in 5 European countries and I using a Large Language Model to detect strategic uses of democracy in party communication. I then link these measures to individual-level vote-switching data (Cohen, Krause & Abou-Chadi 2024) to model how such strategies shape vote switching (Voters retention, defection, and attraction). By showing when and how parties politicise democracy, and the effect on voters, the paper offers a supply-side perspective on democratic backsliding and the erosion of democratic norms. It helps clarify whether appeals to democracy serve to protect democratic standards or instead normalise mutual delegitimation and contribute to democratic decay.