The Demand Side of Democratic Backsliding: Understandings of Democracy among Ordinary Citizens

Research on support for democracy tends to employ overly generic, top-down definitions that provide little insight into what democracy means to individual citizens and how heterogeneous such understandings may be within a given population. Adopting an exploratory perspective, this contribution draws on qualitative data collected via focus group discussions in Poland and Hungary to unpack the diversity of understandings of democracy among ‘ordinary citizens.' It explores what democracy means to focus group participants, how they evaluate democratic practice in their countries, and the roles they see for leaders and citizens in a democracy. The contribution discusses how distinct attitudes relate to core concepts of democracy and which vulnerabilities they may present when it comes to citizens’ tolerance for democratic backsliding. By lending ordinary citizens voice, this contribution offers an in-depth perspective on divergent democratic attitudes in the wider population that exclusively survey-based studies fail to capture and sketches a research agenda that offers novel insights into the shape and nature of citizens' support for democracy.