This seminar is rescheduled to Tuesday 26 March 2024.
Populists around the globe have eroded key (liberal) democratic institutions. How aligned with these actions have the supporters of these parties been? We conduct a well-powered, candidate-choice conjoint experiment in Poland to assess the preferences of the supporters of the ethno-populist incumbent Law and Justice party (compared to other Polish voters) for non-democratic, majoritarian democratic, or liberal democratic candidates. We find that ethno-populist voters reject non-democratic candidates and decidedly favor democratic ones. Ethno-populist voters further prefer candidates who emphasize majority rule, with authorities acting on its behalf, while being unconstrained by unelected institutions and ignoring the demands of minority social and political groups, especially the political opposition. Our study contributes theoretically, methodologically and empirically to the literature on democracy, voting behavior, and populism. We theorize the demand side of the populism-democracy nexus and introduce a novel operationalization of majoritarian democracy. We also test empirically the preferences of populist voters not only for candidates’ general positions on democracy but also on its key norms and practices, which have previously not been examined in the literature.
Tsveta Petrova is a Lecturer in the Discipline of Political Science at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Cornell University in 2011 and then held post-doctoral positions at Harvard University and Columbia University. Her research focuses on democracy, democratization, and democracy promotion. Dr. Petrova's book on democracy export by new democracies, From Solidarity to Geopolitics, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014 and her articles have appeared in Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Democracy, Government and Opposition, Post-Soviet Affairs, Europe-Asia Studies, East European Politics & Societies, Review of International Affairs, and Foreign Policy among others. Her research has been supported by the European Commission, US Social Science Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, Council for European Studies, Smith Richardson Foundation, and IREX. She further serves as a Series Editor for the Memory Politics and Transitional Justice collection at Palgrave-Mcmillan as well as a Scholar with the Rising Democracies Network at the Carnegie Endowment and a Senior Advisor to the Freedom in the World and Nations in Transit Program at the Freedom House.
Julian Hoerner is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on the interaction of electoral behaviour and political institutions in shaping representation, accountability, and the quality of democracy in Europe. He also has an interest in the politics and policies of the European Union and the impact of historical legacies on contemporary politics.