Congratulations to Levente Littvay and Gabor Simonovits and their co-author Jennifer McCoy (Georgia State University) for the article "Democratic Hypocrisy and Out-group Threat: Explaining Citizen Support for Democratic Erosion" published in the Journal of Politics.
Abstract: With widespread democratic backsliding globally, people’s support for democracy-eroding leaders is receiving overdue attention. But existing studies have a difficulty disentangling contextual effects (such as who is in power at the time of the survey) from individual differences (like which party one supports and how strongly). Moreover, we lack evidence on the causal antecedents of these attitudes. We propose a novel survey experimental design to strip away the political context through hypothetical scenarios, allowing allow us to identify citizens’ differential support for democratic norms when their own party is in vs out of power. Our findings indicate a large degree of democratic hypocrisy among the American public: individual support for norm-eroding policies increases when their own party is in power, an effect further amplified by two indicators of polarization: strong expressive partisanship and threat perceived from the opposing party.
You can find the article here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/719009