Mathias Stenner Falkvist

During the Cold War, democracies typically collapsed in coups d’état, with guns ablaze and elected leaders executed, imprisoned, or exiled. Today, democracy rarely ends in a single dramatic event. Instead, elected executives gradually erode its core institutions until the regime no longer resembles a functioning democracy. This process, commonly termed democratic backsliding, unfolds with the quasi-consent of citizens, who often reelect backsliding incumbents across multiple electoral cycles. Why do voters willingly support leaders who dismantle the very institutions that grant them power? This dissertation examines one central part of that puzzle: how incumbent and opposition parties’ narratives shape voters’ approval of democratic violations. It examines this question in the United States, drawing on a plethora of novel survey experiments, media data, and congressional records. First, incumbents with autocratic ambitions frequently frame their transgressions against democracy as desirable, and these justifications substantially increase citizens’ approval of them. Citizens still disapprove of democratic transgressions, but their disapproval remains confined to the specific transgression at hand and does not spill over to other violations. Second, opposition parties can choose whether to compete on democratic legitimacy, and in doing so they shape how salient democracy is to voters. Yet opposition parties gain no electoral advantage from campaigning on democracy relative to conventional policy issues, though neither are they punished for it. These findings lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that an opposition party’s strategy for defending democracy should not focus on democracy alone at the expense of other aspects of contemporary politics.

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