A key feature of democratic backsliding is its contestedness, with experts and citizens often disagreeing over the quality of democracy in a specific country. This is a challenge, as domestic and international responses to backsliding depend on citizens' accurate assessment of the situation. Nevertheless, we have a limited understanding of the nature of and variation within citizens' perceptions of political regimes in contexts of democratic backsliding. The manuscript bridges research on citizens' support for undemocratic leaders, which mostly uses experimental approaches, with survey-based work on the determinants of political evaluations, focusing on the gap in perceptions between government and opposition supporters.
Using detailed evaluations of democratic quality from the European Social Survey (ESS), cross-sectional data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), and original survey data on perceptions of backsliding, the paper highlights a larger gap in perceptions of democratic quality in contexts currently experiencing democratic backsliding and maps its size across different aspects of democracy. This goes beyond the impact of democratic quality studied in previous research.
The manuscript advances three potential explanations for these diverging perceptions. First, citizens' evaluations rely on benchmarking, emphasizing relative change rather than static quality. Second, the stakes of elections and governance rise in contexts of backsliding, making evaluations more polarized. Third, motivated reasoning plays a key role as backsliding alters the availability and framing of accurate performance information. These findings underscore how backsliding widens partisan divides, complicating consensus on democratic norms and reducing citizens' ability to recognize and respond to democratic erosion.