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Most Republicans in a January 2020 survey agreed that “the traditional Americanway of life is disappearing so fast thatwe may have to use force to save it.” More than 40% agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” (In both cases, most of the rest said they were unsure; only one in four or five disagreed.) I use 127 survey items to measure six potential bases of these and other antidemocratic sentiments: partisan affect, enthusiasm for President Trump, political cynicism, economic conservatism, cultural conservatism, and ethnic antagonism. The strongest predictor by far, for the Republican rank-and-file as a whole and for a variety of subgroups defined by education, locale, sex, and political attitudes, is ethnic antagonism—especially concerns about the political power and claims on government resources of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos. The corrosive impact of ethnic antagonism on Republicans’ commitment to democracy underlines the significance of ethnic conflict in contemporary US politics.

Objective/Context: Citizen support for democracy is in question. In the Latin American case, after having increased at the beginning of the 21st century, indicators of support for democracy showed marked decline throughout the last decade. This is particularly evident in the Andean countries, where recent setbacks in the legitimacy of democratic institutions have been accompanied by problematic electoral processes that were deeply questioned by their citizens. Methodology: Using recent data from two of the main sources of comparative public opinion available for Latin America—AmericasBarometer and the World Values Survey— this work focuses on indicators of citizen support for democracy in four countries of the Andean region (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru), investigating the effect of government approval on the evaluation of democracy. The study uses a methodological design that recognizes different levels of support for democracy, to discuss the hypothesis that effects should be different between the levels analyzed. Conclusions: The results show that more concrete levels of support for democracy are more strongly influenced by individual political positions, while the values that sustain democracy are not affected at a statistically significant level. Originality: The methodology allows identifying the multidimensionality of citizen support for democracy and how this support depends on different factors according to the studied level. The conclusions evidence the existence of dynamics common to different societies in relation to democracy.

When and how do voters punish politicians for subverting democracy? To investigate the role of the public in democratic backsliding, I develop a conceptual framework that differentiates among three mechanisms: vote switching, backlash, and disengagement. The first mechanism entails defection by voters from a candidate who undermines democracy to one who does not; the latter two mechanisms entail transitions between voting and abstention. I estimate the magnitude of each mechanism by combining evidence from a series of original survey experiments, traditional surveys, and a quasi-experiment afforded by the rerun of the 2019 Istanbul mayoral election, in which the governing party, akp, attempted to overturn the result of an election that it had lost. I find that although vote switching and backlash contributed to the akp's eventual defeat the most, each of the three mechanisms served as a democratic check in some subset of the Istanbul electorate. Persuasion, mobilization, and even demobilization are all viable tools for curbing the authoritarian tendencies of elected politicians.

Political scientists heavily rely on standard survey questions referring to “democracy” when they study citizens’ attitudes toward (liberal) democracy. However, we only know little about the way in which citizens respond to these questions. This article focuses on two frequently highlighted issues: social desirability and the consistency between citizens’ understanding and researchers’ understanding of the term “democracy.” To address these issues, I collected novel survey data via YouGov from 14,000 British, French, German, and Italian respondents. I use a list experiment to show that respondents do not feel socially pressured to misreport their support for democracy. However, what citizens have in mind when they claim to support democracy only reflects norms and institutions of minimal conceptions of democracy. Overall, this encourages the usage of questions regarding citizens’ support for democracy widely, although this should not be interpreted as the support for anything going beyond minimal conceptions of democracy (providing freedom and allowing for citizens’ influence on political decisions).

The Asian values thesis describes the cultural exceptionalism and alternative political development of East Asia. This study used four rounds of Asian Barometer Survey (ABS) datasets (spanning 2001–2016) to empirically examine the effects of Asian values on citizens’ support for democracy in four East Asian societies—mainland China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—based on the theoretical distinction between the private and political spheres in which Asian values operate. The analysis produced three major findings. First, no remarkable gap exists between the citizens of China and those of other East Asian societies in terms of Asian values in the private sphere. However, Asian values in the political sphere are prevalent in China, while citizens in the other three societies have abandoned them. Second, supporting democracy is not incompatible with accepting the family and social ethics implied by Asian values, whereas Asian values in the political sphere have significantly negative associations with preference for democracy. Third, although most citizens in East Asia support democracy, the strongly positive evaluation of its suitability for local societies observed at the beginning of the twenty-first century has weakened in the region over the last 20 years.

Support for democracy is essential for democracy consolidation and to prevent backsliding into autocracy. This paper employs survey data from Guyana to study explanations of support for democracy. It utilizes seven measures, four of which target decidedly diffuse support with two measuring support for non-democratic principles. It finds that although principled support for democracy based on democracy affirming measures is high and tolerance for non-democratic actions by the incumbent is generally low, large percentages of the citizens (more than 40%) believe that a military takeover in difficult times is justified in some cases. Regime performance, political attitudes, ideological orientation, culture, socioeconomic status and demographic variables all contribute to explaining both specific and diffuse support for democratic and non-democratic principles and they combine to explain between 13.5% and 58.8% of the variance of the democracy/ non-democracy support measures. Furthermore, principled support is shaped by less diffuse support and is impacted by instrumental regime performance. However, inclusion of support for non-democratic principles is crucial to detection of the effects of several variables on principled support or democracy. In addition, cognitive dissonance appears to underlie some of the antecedent relationships with support for democracy and non-democratic principles. Plain Language Summary This paper utilizes survey data from Guyana to study explanations of support for democracy and non-democracy. It finds that although support for democracy as a system of government is high and tolerance for non-democratic actions by the incumbent is generally low, the belief that military takeover in difficult times is justified is prevalent in the population. Several categories of variables are useful in explaining the support for democracy. This includes the performance of the regime, political attitudes, ideological orientations, culture, socioeconomic status and demographic variables. Together these categories of variables explain between 13.5 and 58.8% of the variance in support for democracy or non-democracy measures. However, using only measures based on items that explicitly use the word ‘democracy’ would result in several significant relationships with these variables going undetected. There is also some evidence of people holding contradictory views on democracy support and support for non-democratic principles. In addition, among other significant findings, support for democratic principles depends to some extent on how well the government performs.

In this paper, I explore whether perceived individual inequality is associated with popular demand for democracy in 33 African countries. Past research has diverged on whether individual-level inequality should increase or decrease support for democracy, with some arguing that people might see democracy as a solution to inequality, and others that people might see it as a cause. Much of this research however uses country- level measures of inequality. Recent research however increasingly suggests that such country-level scores of inequality insufficiently capture how ordinary people perceive levels of inequality. I advance our understanding of co-variates of demand for democracy by using a perceptual measure of inequality from the Afrobarometer survey: how people feel their living situation compares to others in their country. I find that perceived relative equality is significantly associated with greater demand for democracy, while perceptions of both relative deprivation and relative advantage are significantly associated with lower democratic demand. These effects are largely significant above and beyond the effect of absolute poverty and known predictors of demand for democracy, such as free and fair elections and level of education.

Recognizing democratic backsliding and increasing support for authoritarianism, research on public preferences for democracy and its authoritarian alternatives has gained traction. Moving beyond the extant focus on economic determinants, our analysis examines the effect of national identity, demonstrating that it is a double-edged sword for regime preferences. Using recent European Values Survey data on 24 European countries from 2017 to 2018, we show that civic national identity is associated with a higher support for democracy and lower support for authoritarian regimes, whereas the reverse holds for ethnic identities. Further, economic hardship moderates these relationships: it strengthens both the negative effect of ethnic national identities and, to some extent, the positive effect of civic national identities on democracy support vis-à-vis authoritarian alternatives. This has important implications for the survival of democracy in times of crises and the study of a cultural backlash, since social identity matters substantively for individuals’ responses to economic hardship.

Do problems with government performance impact public support for democracy? Observational studies offer mixed answers. Given the limits of observational data, we present results from a 2022 survey experiment of nearly 2000 residents in Spain. Respondents were prompted to write about one of two common types of poor government performance—corruption or unemployment. In addition, we asked respondents to write about corruption as generated either by elites or by the system of government generally. Our outcome, support for democracy, is measured using questions about commonly eroded democratic practices and about democracy generally (labeled “conceptual democracy”). We find that the writing primes reduce support for conceptual democracy but did not reduce support for specific democratic practices like civil liberties or institutional checks on executives. These findings show that in addition to factors like partisanship and elite rhetoric, government performance plays an important role in shaping public support for democracy in nuanced ways.

The subject of this article are the ways of understanding democracy in Poland during a crisis of democracy. Six studies were conducted in 2016-2019 on nationwide samples of adult Poles with the use of CAWI and CAPI methodology. Using exploratory factor analysis, we found that the term democracy may have different colloquial meanings. The first one is understanding democracy as “privileges and rights” (since the second half of 2016, enriched with cultivating national values), which we interpret as a populist meaning. An accurate way of understanding democracy was revealed to have existed in the first half of 2016, after which it dissolved into a populist understanding of democracy. Identifying democracy with a Catholic state was the most stable in time. This direction of changes turned out to be sustainable in the light of the results of research conducted on representative samples in 2017 and 2019 with the use of CAPI methodology.Additionally, it turned out that an accurate understanding of democracy increased support for democracy, while understanding democracy as a Catholic state decreased support for democracy. The populist understanding turned out to be unrelated to support for democracy. This changeability in the ways of understanding democracy is explained by events that took place in Poland since 2015 which deepened the crisis of democracy.