The End of ‘Critical Citizens’? How Polarization Undermines Diffuse Support for Democracy

In this age of ‘autocratization’ (Lührmann & Lindberg 2019) in which ordinary citizens’ commitment to the principles and values of liberal democracy has become under scrutiny, many scholars still believe that advanced democracies are relatively immune to the risk of backsliding due to the presence of ‘critical citizens’ (Norris 1999, 2011). According to this theory, citizens can express their discontent with the performance of democratic actors while at the same time continuing to adhere to the democratic ideal. To put it in the terms popularized by Easton (1965, 1975), we should expect critical citizens’ specific support to waver during troubled times, but their diffuse support for the system should remain stable. In this paper, I argue that the rise of political polarization undermines the assumptions made by the critical citizens theory. In particular, I suggest that the hyper-partisanship and hyper-leadership that polarization brings about necessarily (i) blurs the line between incumbents and institutions, and (ii) reduces the symbolic legitimacy of democratic institutions (in a polarized context, democratic institutions cease to act as a symbol shared by all citizens, especially when the political elite treats them as extensions of their partisan organizations). To test my argument, I apply multilevel models to WVS/EVS data from 32 European democracies across 5 different waves (1995-2022) and control for between and within-effects (Fairbrother 2014). This time span is ideal because it covers periods of both democratic stability and erosion. My main hypothesis is that citizens with high diffuse support for democracy will react negatively (their specific support will decrease) to declining levels of democracy, but this effect will disappear in situations of high political polarization.