Democratic Norms Support Measurement
Also known as: Support for Democracy Tradeoff Experiment, Democratic Backsliding Tolerance Measure, Graham-Svolik Democratic Norms Design, Commitment to Democratic Principles Measure
This approach measures how committed ordinary citizens are to democratic norms by observing the price they are willing to pay to uphold them. Rather than asking abstractly whether people value democracy, Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik's 2020 candidate-choice design confronts voters with a co-partisan candidate who violates a democratic principle and estimates how much electoral support that violation costs. Their finding that most Americans will tolerate undemocratic behavior by their own side when partisanship and policy stakes are high reframed the study of democratic backsliding around revealed, not professed, commitment. Christopher Claassen's parallel work links aggregate diffuse support for democracy to whether democracies survive.
Key highlights
- Reveals costly, behavioral commitment to democracy rather than cheap-talk professed support.
- Randomization isolates the effect of norm violations from policy and partisan appeal.
- Quantifies how polarization moderates voters' willingness to punish undemocratic behavior.
- Connects individual revealed preferences to system-level questions about democratic survival.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use this measurement strategy when you want a credible, behaviorally grounded estimate of citizens' commitment to democratic norms, especially to study backsliding, polarization, and the conditions under which voters will or will not punish undemocratic leaders. The candidate-choice design is ideal where abstract support items would be uninformative due to ceiling effects and social desirability. It is less suited when the research goal is to track diffuse legitimacy over time across many countries (aggregate support indices fit better), when realistic norm-violation vignettes cannot be constructed, or when sample sizes are too small to estimate conditional effects across polarization levels.
Strengths & limitations
- Reveals costly, behavioral commitment to democracy rather than cheap-talk professed support.
- Randomization isolates the effect of norm violations from policy and partisan appeal.
- Quantifies how polarization moderates voters' willingness to punish undemocratic behavior.
- Connects individual revealed preferences to system-level questions about democratic survival.
- Hypothetical candidate choices may not match real-ballot behavior with incumbents and information.
- Results are sensitive to which specific violations and policy stakes are chosen.
- Conjoint estimands capture average effects and can mask heterogeneous reasoning.
- Cross-national aggregate support measures and individual experiments capture different things and are hard to reconcile.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
Why not just ask people whether they support democracy?
Because almost everyone says yes, abstract support items hit a ceiling and reveal little about behavior under pressure. The candidate-choice design instead forces a tradeoff, asking voters to choose a candidate who shares their party and policies but violates a democratic norm. The share who defect because of the violation is a costly, revealed measure of commitment. Graham and Svolik show this revealed commitment is far weaker than professed support and depends heavily on partisan and policy stakes.
What is the defection penalty?
It is the drop in a candidate's probability of being chosen caused specifically by committing a democratic violation, estimated as the average marginal component effect of that attribute in the conjoint experiment. A large penalty means voters punish undemocratic behavior; a small one means they tolerate it. Graham and Svolik find the penalty is modest on average and shrinks as the ideological distance to the opposing candidate grows, so polarization makes voters more forgiving of their own side's transgressions.
How does this relate to whether democracies actually survive?
The individual-level experiments measure how much citizens will pay to defend norms; the survival question is about regimes. Claassen's cross-national work bridges them by aggregating diffuse support for democracy and showing it helps democracies endure. The two approaches are complementary: experiments explain the micro-foundations of who punishes backsliding, while aggregate support indices link the overall climate of public commitment to macro-level regime outcomes.
Sources
- 1.Graham, M. H., & Svolik, M. 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.
- 2.Claassen, C. (2020). Does Public Support Help Democracy Survive? American Journal of Political Science, 64(1), 118-134.
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 23). Democratic Norms Support Measurement. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/political-psychology/democratic-norms-support-scale