Are you a PhD student or early career PostDoc researching how citizens and parties behave in democracies, what factors weaken democracies, and what factors strengthen them? Are you currently working on one of your first academic manuscripts? We are organizing a workshop just for you! Please share!

Finally, we tested whether respondents with different levels of satisfaction with how democracy works in their country would react differently to the government plans. In Germany, they do not. In Poland, those dissatisfied defend democracy more. 7/8

Respondents react differently. For example, when asked whether they would demonstrate against the plan (scale: 1 to 7), responses for those attributing an importance of 7 to the institution under threat are 1.31 times higher than responses for those with an imp. of 5. 4/8

We then confronted respondents with a vignette experiment where their preferred government plans to do something that respondents could consider to be undemocratic: banning demonstrations, limiting the power of courts, or implementing reforms against the majority will. 3/8

We first asked respondents questions about their understanding of democracy. Clearly, not everyone in our sample attributed the highest importance to all institutions of democracy included in the questionnaire.

Our data includes information on 213 legislative, lower-house and 30 presidential elections in 34 democracies between 01/01/1919 and 31/12/1945. The figure shows the distribution of regime types across the globe. 26 states had a parliamentary regime, 2 a semi-presidential, and 4 were presidential.

Do you study elite communication surrounding democratic backsliding? David Knoll, @gessler.bsky.social, Christina Zuber and I are looking for contributions to our panel proposal for the upcoming DVPW conference. Please reach out if you want to be part! Early career scholars are welcomed! 🙋‍♀️ polcom