Citizens as Democratic Judges: When Credibility and Ambiguity Collide

Democracies around the world face the challenge of democratic recession and autocratization. Since the turn of the century, these attacks on democracy have been led often by the democratically elected incumbent. In this paper we look at the judiciary as one of the main targets of incumbent-led attacks on democracy. Using a factorial experiment, we aim to explain how the justification provided by the incumbent autocratizer, the blatancy of the attack, and the credibility of the judiciary interact in determining support for the defence of democracy. Existing research has found that citizens’ acquiescence to anti-democratic government actions is key to understanding the success of autocratization attempts. Yet is unclear under which circumstances citizens accept or reject autocratization attempts. The scholarship suggests that citizens take into account among others partisanship and economic evaluations when they judge the legitimacy and democratic quality of a proposal by the incumbent autocratizer. This assumes, however, that citizens know when a specific action erodes democracy. We argue, instead, citizens often face competing claims when it comes to incumbent-led autocratic action, making their judgment whether it is democratic or not more difficult. Therefore, we explore how these competing claims interact in determining citizen evaluations. On the one hand, the incumbent has a democratic mandate and provides a legitimation for an autocratic action. On the other hand pro-democracy actors (‘democratic defenders’), assert the action threatens democracy. In this study, we examine how citizens evaluate these competing claims. We argue that citizens judge the ‘democratic quality’ of an action based on the strength of an incumbent autocratizer’s justification and the credibility of the democratic defender. In addition, some actions more blatantly attack democracy, while others are more subtle. We therefore expect blatancy to have a moderating effect on the autocratizer’s justification and the defender’s credibility. We test these hypotheses using a factorial experiment, where we manipulate three dimensions: (1) the attack on the judiciary, simulating blatant versus covert attacks; (2) the justification provided by the incumbent autocratizer, simulating self-serving versus more sound claims; and (3) the credibility of the judiciary as a democratic defender. The values for all three dimensions are taken from the case-study literature, to ensure realism. We focus on the judiciary as one of the key elite actors in autocratization and often the last bulwark in democratic defence. They are often one of the first targets for the incumbent autocratizer (as seen most prolifically in Poland and Hungary, but also in Turkey, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, India, Nicaragua, and more). At the same time, they are often at the forefront of democratic defence, providing a clear accountability mechanism. In doing so, we contribute to the literature on judicial resilience, democratic recession and democratic defence, by exploring how elite actors vie for the support of the citizens who judge which actions are democratic or not.