Understanding the support for democratic backsliding in Latin America: between populism and elitism

Several studies have presented evidence of a concerning trend towards democratic backsliding (Haggard and Kaufman 2021, Lührmann and Lindberg 2019; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). As Schedler (2019) argues, citizens represent the last layer of resistance against these processes. However, despite a seemingly ubiquitous support for democracy, governments seem capable of pushing forth these undemocratic changes without major public opinion backlash. In this paper, we aim to produce a conceptually consistent framework to link citizens’ attitudes, understanding of what is “democratic”, and, ultimately, level of support for certain democratic institutions. Specifically, populism and elitism are two distinct visions of society that are behind different ways of understanding democracy. We use new survey data from 5 Latin American countries to provide empirical evidence of populist and authoritarian worldviews on attitudes for or against certain democratic institutions