What Matters More Than Policy? Citizens’ Priorities Between Democratic Norm Violations and Policy Information

Understanding electoral behaviour requires not only explaining how citizens vote, but also how they evaluate and prioritise political information in increasingly complex and contested campaign environments. Contemporary elections are characterised by the coexistence of substantive policy competition and widespread concerns about democratic norm violations, including misinformation, attacks on electoral integrity, and uncivil political discourse. This paper examines how citizens prioritise different types of campaign information, and how these priorities vary systematically across attitudinal and ideological groups. Using a preregistered survey experiment conducted in Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States (N ≈ 4,800), we study citizens’ information preferences by placing respondents in the role of editors who must decide which articles about parties’ election manifestos should be published. Respondents are asked to select three articles out of seven, forcing explicit trade-offs under conditions of informational scarcity. The seven articles presented to respondents always contain two pieces on parties' policy plans, while the experiment varies whether violations of democratic norms are framed as weak or strong, and whether they concern institutional norms (press freedom and electoral integrity) or discursive norms (truthfulness, civility, and representative thinking). This design allows us to assess the relative importance citizens in four established democracies place on policy information versus reporting on democratic norm violations, and to test how citizens’ priorities respond to variation in the severity and type of violation. We also analyse how these information preferences are structured by key public opinion variables, including populist, technocratic, and party-centred attitudes, ideological self-placement, education, and norm salience. The findings contribute to research on electoral behaviour and public opinion by clarifying how citizens navigate changing informational environments in election campaigns, how attitudes condition the perceived relevance of policy versus norm-related information, and what this implies for voter judgment and democratic accountability in contemporary democracies.