Who Cares About Democracy?: Experiments on Public Opinion Responses to EU Disputes Over Democratic Backsliding

International organisations, committed to democratic norms, often face tensions when member states pursue anti-democratic policies. While literature sometimes assumes that disputes between a democratic international body and a backsliding member occur either under intense public scrutiny or in public indifference, little is known empirically about how citizens respond to these complex conflicts. The European Union (EU) provides a compelling case to study public engagement in debates about democracy, especially given the introduction of its Rule of Law sanction framework and the growing public salience of democratic backsliding. Despite these developments, scholarship still lags in understanding the role of public opinion, leading to explanatory gaps about institutional sanction behaviour and democratic norms. We conducted two survey experiments simulating realistic sequences of political events to examine how EU actions and backsliding governments’ responses shape public opinion in a democratic member state (Germany, $n = 2{,}700$) and a backsliding state (Hungary, $n = 1{,}600$). In Germany, citizens partially reward the EU for imposing sanctions but strongly penalize it when it retreats from previously announced measures due to political pressure from backsliders. In Hungary, public opinion is heavily shaped by partisanship: government supporters view the Hungarian government favorably and the EU unfavorably, while opposition supporters show the opposite pattern, largely independent of EU or government actions. Opposition supporters, however, respond positively when the EU successfully enforces sanctions and negatively when the Hungarian government resists EU criticism, suggesting that international organisations can still provide meaningful signals for domestic opposition. Overall, findings suggest, international bodies do face public pressure to counter anti-democratic developments, but this pressure may be uneven, and largely originates in still democratic states. As international sanctions have a limited potential to change opinion dynamics in states that are already backsliding, it is even more impactful that citizens of democratic states, as our results show, likely drive strong public pressure for institutions not to trade off values of democracy when negotiating with backsliding governments.