Abstract
AbstractDoes ideological polarization undermine or strengthen people’s principled support for democracy? In this study, we suggest that different manifestations of ideological polarization have different implications in this respect. Using data from 11 surveys conducted with representative samples of the adult populations of a group of liberal democratic countries, part of the Comparative National Elections Project, we look at how people’s level of ideological extremism and their perceptions of ideological polarization in their countries’ party systems are related with their support for democracy. We show that citizens who hold more extreme ideological positions are indeed less supportive of democracy and that such a negative relationship is strengthened as citizens’ extremism increases. However, we also show that the citizens who display higher levels of principled support for democracy are those who perceive parties to be neither too distant nor too close to each other in ideological terms. In other words, while a very polarized partisan supply seems to undermine popular commitment with democracy, very low polarization may have similar consequences.
Highlights
Across today’s democracies, citizens’ allegiance to the principles of liberal democracy seems weaker than once thought
De Leeuw et al (2021) suggest this relationship is, instead, conditional: whether opposition to democracy comes mostly from the left or the right depends on whether recent autocratic experiences were, respectively, ‘leftist’ or ‘rightist’. Given that only the latter type of countries is included in our sample, we include left–right self-placement to take into account the possibility that, independently of the relationship between extremism – how far respondents are from the ideological center of their country’s electorate – and democratic support, the extent to which individuals place themselves to the right might be negatively related with our main dependent variable
The second section of the table shows the conventional parametric terms. They show that principled support for democracy increases with party identification, education, interest in politics, and age, and it is lower among women
Summary
Across today’s democracies, citizens’ allegiance to the principles of liberal democracy seems weaker than once thought.
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