Empowering Leaders or Trading-Off Democracy: Survey Experiment Investigating Citizens’ Support for Democratic Accountability Mechanisms

A growing literature has focused on democratic backsliding and demonstrated how democratically elected leaders remove checks and balances and constraints on their power. One of the main questions arising from this debate relates to the popular responses to these developments. Should we worry that citizens do not care about constraining the power of political authorities? As attacks on other democratic checks and balances are carried out across political systems, this article aims to explore popular responses by testing whether citizens trade off democratic rules for (policy) gains or whether they actually want to empower in-party authorities committing democratic transgressions. It also assesses how citizens judge the transgressions of differnt democratic principles. To do so, we leverage data from large quota-based samples of citizens in three countries: a two-party presidential system (USA, N > 1700), a multi-party parliamentary system based on proportional representation with some semi-presidential features (Poland, N >1800), and a consociational parliamentary system based on proportional representation (Netherlands, N = > 2100). All three countries have attracted some attention in debates about democratic backsliding and about challenges to established institutions. This article discusses research findings based on observational data and on the pre-registered between-subject survey experiment testing the effects of different factors on the approval of a political authority (evaluation, support, trust, justifiability of actions, and willingness to criticize). The vignette experiment uses a factorial design: 2 (in- vs. out-party) x 2 (favored policy vs. no favored policy) x 4 (no democratic violation x limiting the right to protest in the name of policy effectiveness x limiting the right to protest against the government in general x increasing the decree powers of the governments). We also explore the prioritized elements of liberal democracy and condemnation of different transgressions of democratic rules. Our results show that violations of checks and balances are not rewarded and that citizens are vigilant of power grabs by political authorities. We cannot speak of empowerment through violations. The findings imply that trade-offs based on a tribal and policy gains logic are a better explanation of the approval of transgressing authorities.