Recent literature has highlighted a particular challenge to the stability of democracy: While citizens in democracies rarely vote ‘against democracy’, they often acquiesce to anti-democratic policies due to long-established loyalties, their satisfaction with the government and its policies or identity-based double standards. However, research has also shown widespread support for democracy among the citizenry of the same democracies. We wonder, why do citizens acquiesce to democratic backsliding, even though they claim that democracy is important to them? To answer this question, we conduct a nationally representative online survey experiment with 700 respondents from Germany and Poland, each. We show that citizens are most likely to acquiesce to democratic backsliding that affects features of democracy which are not crucial to their conception of what democracy means. We furthermore assess the impact of citizens' satisfaction with democracy on their willingness to tolerate democratic backsliding by their preferred governments. Our research has implications for both practitioners who want to increase the stability of democracies as well as researchers who are working on democratic backsliding and political support in democratic systems.