Democratic Norms Support Measurement

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.