Throughout the past decades, several European anti-immigration politicians have faced prosecution for inciting hatred. Recent findings demonstrated that hate speech prosecution decreases democratic support for a large group of citizens (authors, 2018). The effects are primarily influenced by agreement with ideas spread by the politician, rather than by identification with the politician/party. However, previous research has only been conducted in the Dutch context, where political ideas are generally perceived as more important than party identification. Furthermore, many Dutch citizens believe that free speech should be restricted when being hurtful to groups of people. A cross-cultural study between the Netherlands and the United States provides a great opportunity for testing if the mechanisms hold, as 1) political parties/politicians in the US are hypothesized to play a larger role, due to the two-party system, and 2) free speech is more protected in the US compared to the Netherlands. We conduct a web experiment in the Dutch and American context (N=1200, data currently being collected). Participants are asked to read a news story: The Dutch story refers to a Dutch politician from an anti-immigration party, and the American story refers to a Republican senator who openly expressed strong anti-immigration attitudes. Participants are randomly assigned to one of four conditions: two experimental conditions where the independent variable (the decision to (not) prosecute the politician) is manipulated and two control conditions; one with a reference to hate speech but without mentioning prosecution, and one with a neutral news story. Afterwards, we measure participants’ democratic support.