The protection of minority rights is a fundamental normative and democratic principle. Yet, its disregard persists in various forms of discrimination, global conflict and socio-political disparity—even in advanced democracies. The bulk of scholarly investigation into the matter has focused on top-down processes related to the development and implementation of laws and policies aimed at protecting minority rights, leaving the bottom-up processes related to citizens' support for such laws and policies relatively underexplored. This is likely due to the fact that existing data suggest that citizens’ support for minority rights is rather high and stable—leaving little to investigate. However, I argue that existing measures of support for protecting minority rights suffer from two important shortcomings: minorities are often discussed in abstract terms and support for protecting their rights is often gauged in unconstrained ways. To address these oversights, this paper empirically investigates which specific characteristics influence citizens’ consideration of political minority status using a customized conjoint and perceived deservingness of protection by leveraging a trade-off framing. The results—based on surveys fielded in France, Hungary, Belgium and Switzerland—reveal that political minority status is readily recognized on the basis of numerical considerations, as well as considerations of social dominance/subordinance. However, citizens appear to be mostly unwilling to protect the rights of these political minorities—even when multiple characteristics compound their minority status. These findings reveal that—when pressed—citizens’ commitment to liberal principles of democracy might be more fickle than previously believed.