Citizens' Perceptions of Democracy in the Face of Autocratization

The literature on citizens’ perceptions of democracy has argued that citizens are able to judge the performance of democratic systems and that these evaluations converge with expert scores. In principle, this could provide promising measures of democratic quality and autocratization, as citizens experience changes to democratic systems and may look behind democratic facades meant to deceive formal indicators. In contrast, literature on citizens’ responses to autocratization has argued that even citizens who value democracy typically fail to punish autocratization. One argument here has been that citizens may simply not recognize autocratization as such (Schedler 2019), another that partisanship may bias such evaluations (Graham und Svolik 2020; Simonovits, McCoy, und Littvay 2022). While the former would question conclusions we draw from citizens’ evaluations, the latter means we have to distinguish if partisanship biases not only voting behaviour but also perceptions of autocratization. Bridging work on citizens' perceptions of democracy with that on citizens' responses to autocratization, I address whether we can rely on citizens’ assessment in the measurement of autocratization. Specifically, I analyze whether autocratization is visible in survey data on evaluations of democracy in several countries that have experienced autocratization in the past 10 years. I also analyse whether changes are driven by the changing perceptions of government or opposition supporters and whether political interest increases citizens’ sensitivity to autocratization. For this, I draw on multiple data sources, including the ESS Rotating Module on Democracy and original survey data from Hungary.