Who Defends Democracy? Normative Commitment and Voter Resistance to Democratic Erosion

In a context of growing democratic fragility, the role of citizens as ultimate defenders of democracy has moved into the centre of scholarly and political debate. Which voters are most likely to recognize – and resist – democratic erosion? We focus on the effects of voters’ normative commitment to democracy as a key dimension shaping their willingness to resist democratic transgressions. Drawing on a factorial vignette experiment fielded the the Czech Republic, we study both the attitudes and declared electoral behavior of voters with strong, moderate, and weak commitment to democracy. We find that most citizens, even those with a weak commitment to democracy, recognize democratic transgressions as such, even when they are proposed by their preferred party. However, recognition does not translate into sanctioning behavior. Yet only a minority of citizens – those with a strong commitment to democracy – are willing to resist such transgressions, typically by shifting their electoral support to another party rather than abstaining. By contrast, voters with a moderate commitment to democratic principles respond in much the same way as do those weakly committed to democracy: they fail to sanction their preferred party’s undemocratic behavior. These findings suggest that democratic erosion is facilitated less by misperception than by motivational and prioritization deficits among voters whose democratic commitment is insufficiently strong. Insufficient commitment to democracy thus constitutes a critical vulnerability of democratic systems to erosion. Our results contribute to the literatures on political culture and mass support for democracy and hold important insights for recent debates on democratic resilience.