On the Malleability of Democratic Attitudes: Do Citizens’ Views of Democracy Vary With How They Feel?

How fluid are citizens’ views of democracy and its actors? Citizens widely support democracy in principle, but temporary factors like partisan considerations push many to bend these principles. To identify the limits of this malleability, we examine whether citizens’ democratic views even covary with a seemingly unrelated yet ubiquitous factor: their affective state. Drawing on multidisciplinary research, we theorize that citizens have more (less) benevolent views of democracy and its actors when feeling good (bad). Two studies with nationally representative samples from the Netherlands and the US––analyzing sixteen waves of naturally varying and experimentally induced affective states––test this prediction. We find that citizens’ affective states shape how they evaluate democracy and its actors, but these effects are limited to long-term variation in how they feel. This evidence implies that citizens’ democratic views are––though even more fluid than recently shown––nonetheless robust to immediate variations in affective states.