The forthcoming article “Citizens as a democratic safeguard? The sequence of sanctioning elite attacks on democracy” by Marc S. Jacob is summarized by the author below.
In various democracies worldwide, including Türkiye, Hungary, and Poland, democratically elected incumbents have eroded crucial democratic institutions during their terms. Many of these politicians have managed to maintain electoral support despite widespread public endorsement of democratic governance. This raises important questions: Why do voters often fail to oust these politicians in elections? And are there specific segments of the electorate, such as politically informed, liberal, anti-majoritarian, or moderate voters, who might be more inclined to withdraw their support from such politicians?
A crucial aspect of how citizens can remove undemocratic politicians from office revolves around the sequence in which political elites come to power, undermine democratic institutions, and how voters respond in elections. In electoral democracies, elites are initially elected into office and, over time, can either bolster or undermine democratic institutions, such as the integrity of electoral bodies. Voters can only directly respond when elites violate democratic principles in the subsequent election, meaning that voters can only react retrospectively to undemocratic elite behavior. Another implication of this sequence is that voters must disapprove of this elite conduct, and a sufficiently large number of them must translate this disapproval into revised vote choices.
To investigate how voters assess and ultimately react in their voting choices to undemocratic elite behavior, I conducted a survey experiment in Poland. This experiment simulated the real-world election sequence, where participants were placed in a hypothetical runoff election between candidates from the two principal political alliances in Poland (the incumbent national conservative Law and Justice party and the liberal Civic Coalition). After selecting a candidate, participants were informed whether their chosen candidate won or lost the election. In the event of a victory, they were also informed if their candidate had undermined electoral integrity by refusing to appoint members from another party to the Electoral Commission. In case of defeat, they were informed whether their candidate conceded to the election’s winner. Participants then evaluated this behavior in terms of approval and perceived adherence to democratic principles and indicated whether they would support that politician in the subsequent election.
The results indicated that Polish voters generally disapproved of their preferred candidate’s undemocratic conduct. However, this disapproval had minimal impact, if any, on reducing support for politicians who had violated electoral principles. Even though more informed and liberal-democratic-oriented voters were more critical of undemocratic conduct, the results suggested that segments traditionally seen as more supportive of democracy would not necessarily remove undemocratic politicians from office.
What follows from this evidence? Citizens tend to dislike undemocratic conduct even when committed by politicians they support. However, this disapproval mostly does not manifest in their political behavior. Effective containment of the decay of democratic institutions requires changes in political behavior, but this study suggests that most citizens are unwilling to reconsider their choices even when they oppose undemocratic elite conduct.
About the Author: Marc S. Jacob is a postdoctoral fellow with the Polarization Research Lab at Stanford University and recently completed his Ph.D. at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Their research “Citizens as a democratic safeguard? The sequence of sanctioning elite attacks on democracy” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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