A research project at the University of Fribourg into citizens' democratic attitudes across Europe and how they shape their political identities and behaviour, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, led by Natasha Wunsch.
Liberal democracy is under pressure worldwide. Illiberal actors are gaining support for a platform that directly challenges some central liberal democratic principles. Where such actors gain access to government, they frequently proceed to dismantle executive and erode democracy. So why do citizens often fail to resist the simultaneous rise of illiberalism and democratic backsliding by upholding liberal democratic principles at the ballot box? Building on the findings from a previous Ambizione project (2019-2024), this new SNSF-funded project (2025-2029) will investigate the relevance and heterogeneity of mass attitudes towards democracy as a fundamental factor explaining citizens’ responses to emerging threats to liberal democracy. The project team will theorize and empirically explore variation in liberal democratic commitment as a way to resolve the apparent paradox between mass support for democracy and citizens’ differential willingness to tolerate or even openly endorse political actors who challenge core principles of liberal democracy.
How can we measure the shape and heterogeneity of citizens’ liberal democratic commitment? Which types of democrats can be distinguished and what are their main characteristics? How are these types distributed across different European countries?
How does variation in citizens’ democratic commitment relate to their political identities? And to what extent do elections affect the salience of democratic attitudes for citizens’ group identification?
To what extent do varying levels of liberal democratic commitment affect citizens’ political behaviour?
We take a comparative, cross-country approach and study citizens' commitment in France, Italy, Poland, Finland, the Netherlands, Serbia, Germany, Spain, Estonia, Slovakia, and Romania.
How does electoral turnover affect citizens' liberal democratic commitment? Supporting constraints on executive power costs little while one's own party is out of office, but electoral turnover offers a critical test of whether democratic priorities represent a stable normative orientation or are contingent on political power. In this paper, we leverage a real-world electoral turnover following Hungary's April 2026 parliamentary elections, in which the former opposition party Tisza won a supermajority after sixteen years of deepening autocratization under Fidesz rule. Combining a three-wave panel survey and experimental evidence around this election, we examine how winner-loser status affects the relative importance citizens attach to liberal and majoritarian understandings of democracy. We find substantial partisan differences before the election and systematic updating after turnover, whereby electoral losers become more liberal and winners more majoritarian. These shifts are meaningful but partial, suggesting that citizens' democratic priorities are partly contingent on political power rather than fixed principles. Liberal democratic commitment thus appears to weaken at the moment it would matter mostwhen a party has newly gained office. This finding has important implications for how we assess citizens' capacity to constrain governments in polarized democracies and speaks to broader debates about democratic resilience and restoration.
How do elite justifications shape citizens’ responses to democratic transgressions? Existing studies emphasize partisan loyalty and policy trade-offs, but we know less about responses to deliberate attempts to justify antidemocratic actions. Using a within-subject vignette experiment fielded in Czechia (n = 2,040), we compare normative appeals to majoritarianism, affective appeals to partisan threat, and instrumental appeals to economic performance and stability. Citizens overwhelmingly recognize transgressions as undemocratic, yet majoritarian and especially stability appeals make them less critical. Contrary to expectations, economic appeals are weakly effective, while partisan threat produces a mild backlash. The justifications affect respondents’ likelihood of voting for their preferred party only moderately. Open-ended responses show that respondents engage with the justifications in the theorized terms, while many nevertheless ground their evaluations in principled democratic commitment. The study shows how citizens evaluate undemocratic proposals in light of elite justifications, and which of these they find most – and least – persuasive.
Principal Investigator. Natasha Wunsch is Professor for European Studies and and PI of the SNSF-funded project "Liberal Democratic Commitment in Europe" (DEMCOM). Her research focuses on democratisation and democratic backsliding and combines survey-based approaches, discourse analysis and comparative methods including focus groups and interviews.
Postdoctoral Researcher. Dani Sandu completed his PhD at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and studies social and political identities. He uses experimental and quasi-experimental methods and is also a skeptical user of text-as-data approaches.
Postdoctoral Researcher. Joep van Lit completed his PhD at Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands) and investigates the resilience and defence of democracy, especially against incumbents who challenge it. He focuses on the behavioral consequences of citizens' commitment to liberal democracy, using cross-national surveys and experiments.
Doctoral Candidate. Hannah Groennou finished her Research Master in Social and Cultural Sciences at Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands).
The team works on a broad set of research questions. You can find all their publications on their personal profiles and websites. Here, you will find a selection of their research that directly taps into citizens' commitment to liberal democracy. When research is not available Open Access, feel free to contact us so we can send you a copy!
Do you want to know more about our research? Or talk to us about the impact of the project? Let us know!