Study reveals which values actually stop voters from supporting antidemocratic politicians

New research suggests that an individual’s personal commitment to the institutions of liberal democracy can act as a buffer against voting for politicians who threaten democratic rules. The findings indicate that while political party loyalty heavily influences voter choices, a deep-seated support for democratic principles helps people resist candidates who might otherwise erode democratic norms. The study was published in Public Opinion Quarterly.

Democratic backsliding is an ongoing concern in many modern nations. This process occurs when elected officials gradually dismantle democratic institutions, such as free elections, independent courts, and a free press. A major factor driving this decline is the willingness of ordinary citizens to vote for candidates who violate democratic rules.

Past studies show that voters generally dislike antidemocratic behavior in theory. Yet they often end up supporting politicians who break democratic rules if those politicians belong to their preferred political party or share their policy views. This creates a tension between a voter’s abstract democratic values and their practical political loyalties.

The research was led by Christopher Claassen, a professor of political behavior at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. The study aimed to understand whether specific aspects of a country’s political culture might help prevent this trend.

“A growing body of research shows that voters frequently support politicians who threaten democratic institutions, particularly when those politicians belong to their preferred party or agree with them on important issues,” Claassen told PsyPost. “But we know much less about whether people’s underlying attitudes toward democracy help them resist those pressures.”

“I wanted to connect that recent work on democratic backsliding with the much older political-culture literature, which argues that citizens’ orientations toward democracy can help sustain democratic government,” he explained.

To test this, the researcher analyzed data from 5,951 participants across three democracies currently facing backsliding pressures. The sample included 1,983 people in the United States, 1,967 in Poland, and 2,001 in South Korea. The participants took part in a candidate-choice experiment, which is a type of survey design that simulates an election. Participants were shown pairs of hypothetical political candidates and asked to choose who they would vote for, completing twelve different matchups in total.

The candidates varied randomly in age, gender, occupational background, political party, and policy positions on taxes and gender equality. The central feature of the experiment was that each matchup pitted one prodemocratic candidate against one antidemocratic candidate. The antidemocratic candidates proposed actions like cutting polling stations in opposition areas, ignoring court rulings, or prosecuting journalists. The prodemocratic candidates took the opposite stances, promising to respect these institutions.

Before the simulated elections, the survey measured six dimensions of political culture for each participant. These included preferences for democracy over autocracy, support for liberal democratic institutions, and trust in political institutions. The survey also measured political tolerance, which is the willingness to allow political opponents to have civil rights. Finally, the survey assessed emancipative values, which prioritize individual autonomy and equality, alongside authoritarian values, which prioritize obedience and conformity.

Across the three countries, support for liberal democracy was the most consistent predictor of a willingness to vote for the prodemocratic candidate. This specific measure captures a person’s backing of core institutions like free speech, equal voting rights, and the rule of law. People who scored high on this measure were consistently less likely to reward candidates who threatened these democratic pillars.

“One broader implication is that democratic culture is not a single thing – its multidimensional,” Claassen noted. “I examined several kinds of orientations that political scientists have linked to democracy, and they behaved quite differently.”

“Support for liberal-democratic institutions was the most consistent predictor of pro-democratic choice, which suggests that the particular democratic commitments citizens hold may matter more than simply possessing a generally ‘democratic’ political culture,” he added.

The author looked closely at difficult scenarios known as cross-pressured choices. These are situations where a voter must choose between a prodemocratic candidate from an opposing party and an antidemocratic candidate from their own party. Even in these demanding situations, support for liberal democracy made a noticeable difference. It helped voters resist the temptation to blindly support their own political side.

Specifically, a one-standard-deviation increase in a person’s support for liberal democracy was associated with a 2 to 12 percentage point increase in the probability of choosing the prodemocratic candidate across party lines. This shift depended on the specific country and the statistical model used. While this increase might seem modest, it represents a meaningful shift in competitive elections.

“The effects are meaningful but not enormous,” the researcher said. “That can matter in a close election, but the results also show how powerful partisan loyalties remain.”

Other aspects of political culture showed mixed or weak associations. For instance, having a general preference for democracy over autocracy and holding emancipative values sometimes predicted prodemocratic choices. However, these factors did not predict voting choices consistently across all countries and policy scenarios. Interestingly, trust in political institutions showed almost no relationship with resisting antidemocratic candidates.

“Two findings surprised me,” Claassen explained. “First, political trust had virtually no consistent relationship with choosing the pro-democratic candidate, despite a long tradition of treating trust in institutions as important for democracy. Trust may matter for democracy in other ways, but our results suggest that it does not necessarily make people more willing to defend democratic institutions at the ballot box.”

Claassen was also struck by the weak results for authoritarian values. “There is an obvious theoretical connection between authoritarian values and authoritarian political systems – they even share the same name – but those values were not strong predictors of candidate choice in my study,” he noted. “It may be that these underlying social values are simply too distant from concrete decisions about electoral choices.”

The statistical models controlled for various factors to isolate the role of political culture. These controls included age, gender, education, income, and geographic region. The models also accounted for political interest, preferred party, and the participants’ actual positions on redistribution and gender equality.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind regarding this study. The voting choices were made in a simulated survey environment rather than a real election. In actual elections, voters face intense campaign messaging and social pressures that might alter how they weigh democratic violations against party loyalty. The hypothetical nature of the survey means we cannot be certain these exact percentage shifts would appear at a real ballot box.

The findings are also observational regarding political culture. Because a person’s values and beliefs cannot be randomly assigned in an experiment, the results show an association rather than a direct cause-and-effect relationship. We can see that strong democratic beliefs predict certain voting patterns, but we cannot isolate those beliefs from other lifelong personal traits that might influence a voter’s decisions.

“The candidate attributes were experimentally randomized, but respondents’ democratic orientations were measured rather than manipulated,” Claassen noted, reinforcing that the relationship should be understood as an association rather than a causal effect.

Finally, the pull of partisanship remains incredibly strong. In the Polish and South Korean samples, the predicted support for prodemocratic candidates from an opposing party often remained below 50 percent, even among citizens with high democratic commitments. This suggests that while strong democratic values help people resist backsliding, they do not always create a majority willing to cross party lines to punish bad actors.

“I would avoid interpreting the findings as showing that strong democratic attitudes will necessarily defeat anti-democratic politicians,” Claassen cautioned.

“The main takeaway is that what ordinary citizens think about democracy does matter,” the researcher summarized. “People who more strongly support liberal-democratic institutions were more likely to choose the pro-democratic candidate, including in situations where their partisan identity or ideological position pulled them in the opposite direction.”

“So democratic resilience is not something entirely outside citizens’ hands,” he added. “At the same time, public support is only one part of the story: what political leaders, parties, and institutions do matters enormously for whether democracy survives.”

Looking ahead, the researcher plans to refine how these attitudes are studied. “One next step is to develop more fine-grained measures of democratic orientations,” Claassen noted. “Most research focuses either on support for democratic institutions or democracy itself, and I think there is room to measure underlying democratic values more carefully and systematically.”

“I’m also interested in why people sometimes bring their democratic attitudes to bear on a voting decision and sometimes do not,” he said. “In particular, I’m looking at factors such as attitude importance and accessibility: whether democracy is something people care deeply about and whether those considerations are readily available in their minds when they actually make a political choice.”

The study, “Voting for Democracy? Testing Political-Cultural Constraints on Democratic Backsliding,” was authored by Christopher Claassen.