De-liberalizing societies and its political consequences: Understanding the Impact of Historical Legacies and Socialization on Democratic Backsliding and Illiberal Attitudes

In recent years, various countries around the globe have experienced democratic backsliding in the form of gradual and incremental changes that undermine democratic norms, institutions, and values. This occurs primarily due to the actions and attitudes of various societal actors, including citizens, political parties and civil society groups as opposed to top-down authoritarian takeovers (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2019). Even supposedly consolidated democracies in North America and Western Europe have taken an illiberal turn (Foa & Mounk 2016). One of the key aspects of illiberal turns is the acceptance or promotion of authoritarian practices or illiberal ideologies and the withholding of liberties from historically disadvantaged groups such as women, LGBTQ citizens and immigrants. Why are values “de-liberalizing” across citizens of already established and/or consolidating democracies? There is consensus in the literature that, under certain institutional settings and social norms, prejudice did not disappear but rather became latent, but could be activated under certain conditions using particular types of appeals. Therefore, this project asks what are the institutional settings that allow for illiberal attitudes across citizens towards minority groups to be „activated“ again. The assumptions are that living under a certain institutional setting in the past, the period of one’s life in which the person lived under the said political regime and their specific individual characteristics predict their current embracement or rejection of illiberal attitudes under current institutions. I set out to establish what are the specific conditions and circumstances under which the embracement or rejection of illiberal attitudes among citizens takes place. The project studies political socialization and change in political attitudes over four decades (1981-2022) globally and approaches macro-level historical, generational and institutional factors not only as the main effects but also as moderators of cultural and economic grievances‘ effects on (il)liberal and (anti-)democratic attitudes. I develop a framework on how certain configurations of political socialization under specific conditions, individual values and sociodemographic characteristics lead to the formation of illiberal attitudes. To do so, I use large-N global surveys (World Value Survey, International Social Survey, European Values Study) based on publicly available datasets that comprise countries and many country waves (Neundorf 2018) and allow for the observation of individuals and countries over time.