How do citizens understand democratic norms, and when will they defend or violate them? them? This Workshop brings together research on citizens’ commitments to liberal-democratic principles, their conceptions of democracy, and their responses to democratic norm violations. Particular attention will be paid to tensions between majoritarian and liberal or rule-constrained understandings of democracy, and to the political and psychological forces that shape how democratic principles are interpreted and applied. The Workshop welcomes theoretical, observational, experimental, and comparative contributions examining the micro-foundations of democratic resilience and vulnerability. It also seeks to build a shared agenda on measurement and research design.
A rapidly growing literature examines citizens’ willingness to tolerate violations of democratic norms and the conditions under which public support can enable processes of democratic erosion. Yet an important shift is taking place within this research agenda. Rather than treating support for democracy as a unidimensional commitment, scholars increasingly investigate heterogeneity in what citizens understand democracy to mean. Majoritarian understandings emphasizing electoral mandates and majority rule may coexist (and potentially conflict) with liberal-democratic conceptions centred on institutional constraints, minority rights, judicial independence, and checks and balances. Understanding how deeply these different conceptions are rooted, and how they shape citizens’ reactions to norm violations, is therefore central to explaining both democratic resilience and vulnerability.
Democratic commitments do not operate in a political vacuum. Partisanship, affective polarization, ideological congruence, political ideology, and motivated reasoning may affect whether citizens recognize democratic violations, tolerate them when politically advantageous, or reinterpret democratic principles in ways that justify preferred political outcomes. Existing research provides competing accounts of the relative importance of these normative, ideological, and psychological mechanisms, and of how they interact. Bringing these literatures together also raises questions of measurement and design: how conceptions of democracy are captured in surveys, and how far experimental findings on hypothetical violations travel to real political choices.
The Workshop will bring these strands of research into direct conversation. It welcomes contributions from political behaviour, political psychology, social psychology, comparative politics, and democratic theory that investigate how citizens understand, recognize, defend, trade off, or rationalize democratic norms and liberal-democratic institutions.
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1: How do citizens understand democracy, and how deeply rooted are these understandings?
2: Do majoritarian and liberal conceptions of democracy conflict in citizens’ minds?
3: How do partisanship, ideology and polarisation shape the defence of democratic norms?
4: When do citizens sanction, tolerate, or rationalise violations of democratic norms?
5: Do stated commitments predict costly action, such as vote switching, protest, or turnout?
1: Citizens’ conceptions of democracy: theory, measurement and validation
2: Comparative and cross-national variation in democratic commitments
3: Majoritarian versus liberal-democratic understandings of democracy
4: Recognition and sanctioning of elite violations of democratic norms
5: Partisan and ideological rationalisation of undemocratic behaviour
6: From attitudes to action: costly defence of democracy at the ballot box and beyond
7: Affective polarisation and the willingness to defend democracy
8: Elite cues, media, and the framing of democratic principles
