The partisan nature of support for democratic backsliding: A comparative perspective

This article asks whether the willingness of partisans to condone democratic backsliding is a uniquely American phenomenon and explores why partisans would tolerate a party leader subverting democratic norms. We focus on executive aggrandizement as a key mechanism through which democratic backsliding occurs and develop three potential explanations for why partisans would accept the weakening of checks on the power of the executive. First, in a context of affective polarization, partisans may condone executive aggrandizement in order to advantage their party and disadvantage the opponent. Second, partisans may be willing to trade off democratic norms in pursuit of their ideological agenda. Third, partisans may take cues from the behaviour of party elites. These explanations are tested using a candidate-choice conjoint experiment administered to Americans and Canadians in 2019 that involved respondents choosing between hypothetical candidates in intra-party contests. Regardless of party, partisans in both countries proved willing to choose candidates who would loosen legislative and judicial restraints on the executive. While the partisan advantage explanation only held for strong Republicans in the United States, partisans in Canada and the United States alike were apparently willing to weaken restraints on the executive for the sake of their ideological agendas, at least in the case of abortion. Finally, Republicans who approved of the Trump presidency were much less likely than other Republicans to punish undemocratic candidates, lending support to the cue-taking explanation.