The Internet has played important roles in driving political changes around the world. Why does it help to topple political regimes in some places but improve the quality of governance in others? We found Internet usage in general leads to citizens’ distrust in political institutions. Different political environments, however, can condition such trust-eroding impacts of the Internet in significantly different ways. A democracy enables citizens to connect their online behaviors and offline expression and organization, releasing political discontent while facilitating state–society communication. On the contrary, by restricting various forms of off-line expression, authoritarian regimes drive Internet-active citizens' discontent and distrust to higher levels. We use the World Values Survey data to establish these different mechanisms across democracies and authoritarian systems. Entropy balancing shows our findings to be highly robust.

While the ‘critical citizens’ literature shows that publics often evaluate democracies negatively, much less is known about ‘critical parties’, especially mainstream ones. This article develops a model to explain empirical variation in parties’ evaluations of democratic institutions, based on two mechanisms: first, that parties’ regime access affects their regime support, which, secondly, is moderated by over-time habituation to democracy. Using expert surveys of all electorally significant parties in twenty-four European countries in 2008 and 2013, the results show that parties evaluate institutions positively when they have regular access to a regime, regardless of their ideology and the regime’s duration. Moreover, regime duration affects stances indirectly by providing democracies with a buffer against an incumbent’s electoral defeat in the most recent election. The findings point to heightened possibilities for parties to negatively evaluate democracies given the increased volatility in party systems in Europe.