Justifying the Unjustifiable: In-party Cues and Citizen Acceptance of Democratic Transgressions

Why do citizens tolerate democratic transgressions? Existing studies focus on partisan loyalty and citizens’ instrumental trade-offs, but fail to factor in deliberate efforts by elites to affect citizens’ perceptions of their undemocratic actions. Combining the literatures on elite cues and democratic erosion, we leverage a within-subject vignette experiment in the Czech Republic to study how different in-party cues might affect citizens’ tolerance towards co-partisan democratic transgressions. Our findings show that in-party justifications alter citizens’ evaluations of different transgressions but not their likelihood to vote for their preferred party. Concretely, elite appeals to stability and, to a lesser extent, majority rule lead citizens to respond less harshly to undemocratic proposals. In turn, we find no evidence for the effectiveness of emphasizing polarization or economic priorities, the two arguments most frequently studied in the literature. By shedding light on the interactions between the supply and demand sides of democratic erosion, the study provides novel insights into the dynamics underpinning citizens’ puzzling failure to oppose undemocratic actions more vigorously.