Saturday, September 5, 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm
2026 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition — Boston, MA | Register here
In-person | Full Paper Panel
Participants:
Session Description:
Contemporary democratic erosion is perpetrated from within by popularly elected leaders who remove legislative and judicial controls, silence the media, and harass the opposition. The popular basis of democratic backsliding has led to an active area of research that examines why citizens turn against democracy. Influential recent work has shown that contextual factors such as polarization, inequality and economic shocks induce citizens to actively support or passively acquiesce to attacks on democratic institutions.
This panel turns attention to the overlooked but equally consequential question of why citizens support democracy. The chair (Laia Balcells, Georgetown) and discussant (Vicente Valentim, IE University) have made seminal contributions to examining causes and exploring interventions that may strengthen citizens commitment to democracy amidst external challenges. The proposals further knowledge on citizen’s role in contemporary backsliding by drawing insights from scholars studying Latin America and Eastern Europe. Unlike work on the US and Western European democracies, these are post-authoritarian settings, where legacies from past autocracies leave an imprint on citizens beliefs and also generate institutions that can shape political behavior by elites and citizens. Against this backdrop, this panel centers on two frontier questions in the study of citizen support for democracy in the era of backsliding: Are citizens able to discern authoritarian transgressions and willing to punish them? Can institutional interventions inoculate citizens against the sirens’ call of democratic backsliding?
The first two papers offer sophisticated and politically relevant answers to an enduring challenge for democratic oppositions: Why does a substantial swath of the electorate that disapproves of democratic backsliding fails to sanction its perpetrators? González-Ocantos (University of Oxford) and Meléndez (Universidade de Lisboa) probe citizens’ competence for detecting attempts at democratic backsliding and study whether institutional interventions can help improve judgements. Through a conjoint survey experiment fielded in Brazil, they find that while citizens substantially penalize most infractions, there is significant heterogeneity by type of infraction as well as ideology and partisanship. A crucial –yet sobering – contribution of this study is to reveal that raising the salience of a high-profile Supreme Court ruling against Bolsonaro’s coup attempt does not increase the detection of infractions. van Lit (Radboud University), Petrova (Columbia University) and Wunsch (University of Freiburg) offer a path-breaking dissection of the types of citizens able and willing to identify and punish perpetrators of democratic backsliding. They study voters’ normative commitment to democracy through a factorial vignette experiment in the Czech Republic. The authors’ contribution is to shed light on why the gap in backsliding punishment emerges: voters with a moderate commitment to democracy behave like uncommitted ones by failing to sanction their preferred party’s undemocratic behavior. The authors show that this critical vulnerability for democracy is rooted less in misperception than in motivational and prioritization deficits. Baraybar-Hidalgo’s paper pushes the envelope on citizen discernment in a crucial way by demonstrating that history shapes what citizens perceive as undemocratic. The setting is Peruvian President Castillo’s failed attempt to dissolve Congress in December 2022. Based on public opinion data, social media data and in-depth interviews with key actors it shows that people did not deny the attempted coup but interpreted it through long-standing memories of state violence, inequality, and exclusion. The findings suggest that addressing issues such as polarisation and democratic erosion requires engagement with how citizens understand democracy itself.
The remaining two papers explore how transitional justice and memory building institutions can generate durable democratic commitment. The paper by van derWilden offers a much-needed assessment of the evidence for the effect of transitional justice on public opinion. It carries out a meta-analysis that not only provides an aggregate estimate of the effect(s) of TJ, but that also explores heterogeneity by aggregate –geography, TJ mechanism, and time since transition – and individual-level moderators – such as age, gender, and ideology. Mainwaring and Schiumerini examine how the institutional context of post-authoritarian countries can generate support for democracy by exposing citizens to memories of repression under past autocracies. Using cross-country surveys from Latin America, they show that we show that when democracies outperform autocracies in protecting liberties, citizens value democracy more. Furthermore, original panel surveys with embedded experiments show that exposure to collective memory through transitional justice and film solidified beliefs about the democratic advantage in civil liberties.
2026 APSA Theme Panel: Polarization and Power: State Politics at the Frontlines of Democracy
David L. Weimer Receives the 2026 John Gaus Award
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