Polarized Democracy: Diverging Attitudes Towards Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe

Citizen support for democracy is widely considered a key condition for its emergence and long-term stability. Yet, the broad endorsement of democracy observed in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) after 1989 did not immunize these countries against subsequent episodes of democratic erosion, carried out - albeit to varying degrees - by democratically elected governments. In this paper, we analyse the transformation of democratic attitudes in CEE from a comparative perspective. We focus on three dimensions: (1) acceptance of democracy as a system of government, (2) satisfaction with the functioning of democracy in respondents’ countries, and (3) normative understandings of democracy, as well as their variation across party electorates. Drawing on all rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS), we show that erosion of democratic institutions under populist governments, combined with intense political conflict and comparatively low levels of diffuse democratic support, has produced deep and persistent polarization along partisan lines. Specifically, voter groups increasingly diverge in how they assess both the importance of democracy and their satisfaction with its functioning. Moreover, rising political polarization has amplified pre-existing differences in how electorates conceptualize the core components of democracy. In some cases - most notably Poland and Hungary - this process has led to the erosion of a shared normative foundation, resulting in the near disappearance of commonly held definitions of what democracy entails. We complement this analysis with an original, hand-coded dataset of parliamentary speeches on democracy (2001-2023), which allows us to examine elite-level discourses in parallel. We demonstrate that polarization among political elites has also intensified, particularly with regard to the liberal dimension of democracy. However, some trends observed among voters - such as increased satisfaction with the economic dimension of democracy - are not accompanied by a more egalitarian or socially inclusive vision of democracy among political elites. Rather than a narrative redefinition of democracy, we only observe a selective delegitimation of liberal democratic principles. By linking mass attitudes and elite discourses, this paper contributes to debates on democratic backsliding by highlighting polarization not only as a consequence but also as a constitutive mechanism of democratic erosion. We argue that the fragmentation of democratic meanings itself represents a critical and under-theorized dimension of contemporary democratic crisis in CEE. This fragmentation generates long-term obstacles to democratic recovery after periods of populist rule, as the absence of a shared understanding of democracy undermines the social foundations necessary for social and institutional rebuilding.