Hostname: page-component-f554764f5-c4bhq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-10T10:46:51.469Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Does Competence Make Citizens Tolerate Undemocratic Behavior?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2022

KRISTIAN VREDE SKAANING FREDERIKSEN Open the ORCID record for KRISTIAN VREDE SKAANING FREDERIKSEN [Opens in a new window]
KRISTIAN VREDE SKAANING FREDERIKSEN*
Affiliation:
Aarhus University, Denmark
*
Kristian Vrede Skaaning Frederiksen, PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Denmark, [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Are citizens willing to tolerate violations of democratic rules and norms by competent political leaders? I examine this question employing well-powered conjoint experiments in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Mexico, and South Korea. The findings yield good as well as bad news for democracy. I find that undemocratic behavior by political candidates decreases voter support, whereas candidate competence increases support. Contrary to expectations, the effects of undemocratic behavior and competence do not interact. This means that competent candidates are sanctioned for violating democratic principles but also that support for undemocratic candidates increases with their competence. These findings can help explain the successes and failures of undemocratic political leaders around the world: although these leaders can gain support by appearing to be competent, competence does not make citizens tolerate undemocratic behavior entirely.

Type
Letter
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 116 , Issue 3 , August 2022 , pp. 1147 - 1153
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Ahlquist, John S., Ichino, Nahomi, Wittenberg, Jason, and Ziblatt, Daniel. 2018. “How Do Voters Perceive Changes to the Rules of the Game? Evidence from the 2014 Hungarian Elections.” Journal of Comparative Economics 46 (4): 906–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Albertus, Michael, and Grossman, Guy. 2021. “The Americas: When Do Voters Support Power Grabs?” Journal of Democracy 32 (2): 116–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartels, Larry M. 2020. “Ethnic Antagonism Erodes Republicans’ Commitment To Democracy.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117 (37): 22752–759.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bertsou, Eri, and Caramani, Daniele. 2022. “People Haven’t Had Enough of Experts: Technocratic Attitudes among Citizens in Nine European Democracies.” American Journal of Political Science 66 (1): 5–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breitenstein, Sofia. 2019. “Choosing the Crook: A Conjoint Experiment on Voting for Corrupt Politicians.” Research & Politics 6 (1): 1–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caramani, Daniele. 2017. “Will vs. Reason: The Populist and Technocratic Forms of Political Representation and Their Critique to Party Government.” American Political Science Review 111 (1): 54–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carey, John M., Clayton, Katherine, Helmke, Gretchen, Nyhan, Brendan, Sanders, Mitchell, and Stokes, Susan. 2022. “Who Will Defend Democracy? Evaluating Tradeoffs in Candidate Support among Partisan Donors and Voters.” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 32 (1): 230–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coppock, Alexander, and McClellan, Oliver A.. 2019. “Validating the Demographic, Political, Psychological, and Experimental Results Obtained from a New Source of Online Survey Respondents.” Research & Politics 6 (1): 1–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dahl, Robert A. 1985. Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
de la Cuesta, Brandon, Egami, Naoki, and Imai, Kosuke. 2022. “Improving the External Validity of Conjoint Analysis: The Essential Role of Profile Distribution.” Political Analysis 30 (1): 19–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Vries, Catherine E., and Solaz, Hector. 2017. “The Electoral Consequences of Corruption.” Annual Review of Political Science 20: 391–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Egami, Naoki, and Hartman, Erin. 2020. “Elements of External Validity: Framework, Design, and Analysis.” Working Paper. doi:http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3775158.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Findley, Michael G., Kikuta, Kyosuke, and Denly, Michael. 2021. “External Validity.” Annual Review of Political Science 24: 365–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frederiksen, Kristian Vrede Skaaning. 2022. “Replication Data for: Does Competence Make Citizens Tolerate Undemocratic Behavior?” Harvard Dataverse. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NGFLRO.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graham, Matthew H., and Svolik, Milan W.. 2020. “Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States.” American Political Science Review 114 (2): 392–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, Jane, and Jennings, Will. 2017. The Politics of Competence: Parties, Public Opinion and Voters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hainmueller, Jens, Hopkins, Daniel J., and Yamamoto, Teppei. 2014. “Causal Inference in Conjoint Analysis: Understanding Multidimensional Choices via Stated Preference Experiments.” Political Analysis 22 (1): 1–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hajek, Lukas. 2017. “Left, Right, Left, Right … Centre: Ideological Position of Andrej Babiš’s ANO.” Politologický časopis (Czech Journal of Political Science) 3: 275–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hobolt, Sara B., Leeper, Thomas J., and Tilley, James. 2021. “Divided by the Vote: Affective Polarization in the Wake of the Brexit Referendum.” British Journal of Political Science 51 (4): 1476–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klašnja, Marko, Lupu, Noam, and Tucker, Joshua A.. 2021. “When Do Voters Sanction Corrupt Politicians?” Journal of Experimental Political Science 8 (2): 161–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langston, Joy K. 2017. Democratization and Authoritarian Party Survival: Mexico’s PRI. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, Jung Hwa. 2016. “A Study on the Party System in South Korea after Democratization.” PhD diss. University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Leeper, Thomas J., Hobolt, Sara B., and Tilley, James. 2020. “Measuring Subgroup Preferences in Conjoint Experiments.” Political Analysis 28 (2): 207–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levitsky, Steven, and Ziblatt, Daniel. 2018. How Democracies Die: What History Reveals about Our Future. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1983. Expanded Edition, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. London: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Luo, Zhaotian, and Przeworski, Adam. 2019. “Democracy and Its Vulnerabilities: Dynamics of Backsliding.” SocArXiv. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3469373.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Møller, Jørgen, and Skaaning, Svend-Erik. 2013. “Regime Types and Democratic Sequencing.” Journal of Democracy 24 (1): 142–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petrocik, John R. 1996. “Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study.” American Journal of Political Science 40 (3): 825–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pew Research Center. 2020. “Democratic Rights Popular Globally but Commitment to Them Not Always Strong.” Technical Report. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/02/27/attitudes-toward-democratic-rights-and-institutions/.Google Scholar
Shadish, William R., Cook, Thomas D., and Campbell, Donald T.. 2002. Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Svolik, Milan W. 2019. “Polarization versus Democracy.” Journal of Democracy 30 (3): 20–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Touchton, Michael, Klofstad, Casey, and Uscinski, Joseph. 2020. “Does Partisanship Promote Anti-Democratic Impulses? Evidence from a Survey Experiment.” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 12 (November): 1–13.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Frederiksen Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NGFLRO
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Frederiksen supplementary material

Frederiksen supplementary material

Download Frederiksen supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 626.9 KB
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.