Democratic Hypocrisy and Out-Group Threat: Explaining Citizen Support for Democratic Erosion

With widespread democratic backsliding globally, people’s support for democracy-eroding leaders is receiving overdue attention. But existing studies have difficulty disentangling contextual effects (such as who in power at the time of survey) from individual differences (like which party one supports and how strongly). Moreover, we lack evidence on causal antecedents these attitudes. We propose a novel survey experimental design to strip away political context through hypothetical scenarios, allowing us identify citizens’ differential norms when their own versus out power. Our findings indicate large degree hypocrisy among American public, whose norm-eroding policies increases power, an effect further amplified by two indicators polarization: strong expressive partisanship threat perceived opposing party.