European Citizens’ Reactions to Democratic Norm Violations of Different Degrees of Severity

The aim of this paper is to investigate citizens' attitudes towards violations of democratic norms by political parties. In this paper, we want to assess whether citizens distinguish between different levels of violations and react accordingly, both in terms of evaluating the violation and in terms of punishing the offending party. We registered a survey experiment in the six most populous European countries (sample size, around 1500 respondents per country): we expose citizens to two different vignettes on two specific qualities of democracy, i.e. inclusiveness and open contestation. These two qualities are considered to be the cornerstones of any liberal democratic regime. While previous research has often focused on isolated instances of democratic norm violations, we propose a comparative analysis of three types of violations: "mild" (regulatory hurdle), "substantial" (veiled interference), and "flagrant" (total suppression). Second, the literature lacks experimental analyses of actual violations of democratic norms, often focusing on hypothetical scenarios or statements made by politicians during election campaigns. In contrast, our experiment involves violations committed by a ruling party to manipulate election outcomes, allowing us to examine how citizens respond to real-world violations. Third, we examine the role of authoritarian personality traits in shaping citizens' tolerance for norm violations. While some theorists suggest that authoritarians may be more likely to tolerate violations due to a dominance-oriented mindset, others argue that their preference for rule adherence may lead them to punish the party in power. Our study aims to clarify this debate. Finally, we examine the effect of affective polarisation between pairs of parties on citizens' responses to norm violations, with the aim of understanding whether low-polarised and highly-polarised citizens have the same responses to democratic norm violations, in line with recent studies suggesting that we should break the linearity assumption for democratic support.