Pre-Analysis Plan Democratic Backsliding, Understandings of Democracy, and Political Choice: A Survey Experiment in Poland Natasha Wunsch, ETH Zurich & Sciences Po Paris Marc S. Jacob, ETH Zurich Laurenz Derksen, ETH Zurich First draft: January 2021 Current version: 7 July 2021 Abstract In electoral democracies, political actors engaged in democratic backsliding require at least some degree of voter consent. So why do citizens support candidates who endorse undemocratic prac- tices? The bulk of existing research assumes that a common understanding of democracy under- pins citizens’ evaluations of different candidates, leading them to actively trade off undemocratic or illiberal practices against partisan or economic considerations. We question this view by sug- gesting that different understandings of democracy may coexist in a given electorate, including ones that are at odds with some fundamental stipulations of liberal democracy, such as the separa- tion of powers and independent media. Drawing on the literatures on political culture, political behaviour, and democratisation, we develop a series of hypotheses to probe the influence of diver- gent understandings of democracy upon candidate choice. We outline a survey experiment articu- lated around a candidate choice conjoint that serves to evaluate these hypotheses against alternative explanatory factors. 1 1 - Project overview Whereas dominant executives tend to drive the gradual erosion of domestic checks and balances and civil liberties, citizens play a central role in supporting or at least tolerating undemocratic practices by elected leaders. Our study proposes to probe the sources of voter support for candi- dates espousing such illiberal practices. We posit that political actors in democracies do not only represent different policy preferences, but may also stand for distinct system-level preferences to which voters respond. We outline the experimental design through which we aim to probe the mechanism(s) underpinning citizens’ support for candidates advocating democratically question- able practices. What unites the bulk of existing research on candidate choice in contexts of democratic backsliding (Carey et al. 2020; Graham and Svolik 2020; McCoy, Simonovits, and Littvay 2020) is the (gen- erally implicit) assumption that a common understanding of democracy underpins citizens’ eval- uations of different candidates, leading them to actively trade off undemocratic practices against competing candidates’ personal, partisan or policy-related characteristics. We challenge this view by contending that understandings of democracy may comprise alternative views of the concept, including ones at odds with the emphasis on checks and balances that are the hallmarks of liberal democracy. We expect such divergent understandings of democracy to co-exist even in consoli- dated democracies and to inform citizens’ electoral choices and evaluations of alternative candi- dates. In other words, we submit that voters may endorse specific candidates not despite the un- democratic practices they sponsor, but precisely because these candidates’ professed preferences align with their own understanding of the meaning and purpose of democracy. To explain citizen support for illiberal practices, we evaluate the relevance of democratic prefer- ences against a series of alternative mechanisms. Our research design consists of a survey experi- ment in the form of a candidate choice conjoint. We place respondents into a hypothetical election situation and confront them with two candidate profiles that diverge according to their stated dem- ocratic, outcome-related, and cultural positions as well as their partisan affiliation. Respondents are asked to choose which candidate they would be most likely to vote for as well as to provide an 2 individual rating for each profile. We expect our results to provide an indication of which ele- ment(s) citizens consider most crucial in their evaluation of competing candidates and to reveal the relative importance of divergent understandings of democracy for their candidate choice. The experiment will be fielded in Poland, which represents a paradigmatic case of democratic backsliding. Poland is experiencing deepening political and societal polarisation (Fomina 2019; Tworzecki 2019), making it a particularly promising context in which to study the relevance of divergent understandings of democracy and their interactions with partisan and policy-based pref- erences as drivers of candidate support. Finally, our study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to analyse democratic backsliding via a candidate choice conjoint in a European, multi-party set- ting. 2 - Research design Our survey consists of a candidate choice conjoint experiment. The survey will be divided into two parts, with the conjoint experiment complemented by a series of general questions related to socio-economic as well as political information which we will use for subset analyses. A set of open-ended questions as well as further items are included for additional analyses as explained below. Throughout the survey, we plan to use attention checks and time stamps to be able to re- move response profiles that do not fulfil minimal attention and temporal requirements (Berinsky, Margolis, and Sances 2014). 2.1 Sample The survey into which our conjoint experiment is embedded will be fielded online by the Warsaw- based market research company Inquiry. Respondents will be sent to our own website containing our survey programmed via Qualtrics. Sampling will be based on national representativeness re- garding age, gender, education, and vote choice at the last national election. The full sample will comprise around 2’700 respondents. 2.2 Conjoint design The central feature of our experiment consists of a paired candidate choice conjoint, which consists of twelve tasks during which participants will be asked to choose between two randomly generated 3 profiles of candidates running for seats in the national parliament. We will ask respondents to choose between two candidates (forced choice) and to rate each candidate on a scale from 1 (strongly disapprove) to 7 (strongly approve). The rating question allows us to estimate how well on average randomly generated candidate profiles reflected the respondents’ preferences and serves as the basis to assess individual marginal component effects (IMCEs) (Zhirkov 2021). Each candidate profile will be identified with a neutral label (‘Candidate A’ vs. ‘Candidate B’) and will display randomized information on seven attributes. The order of attributes is fully randomized anew for each choice task. The interface for the candidate choice experiment is displayed in Ap- pendix B. Candidate profiles will consist of a set of preferences related to democratic preferences, cultural views, economic outcomes as well as a party label. The first set of attributes on democratic pref- erences includes a procedural element of democracy relating to nomination of judges and an at- tribute relating to civil liberties that addresses the role of public media. These two attributes were selected to reflect two distinct dimensions on which democratic erosion may occur and to probe the salience of such forms of erosion for respondents’ candidate choice. We seek to capture diver- gent understandings of democracy by formulating the levels for the two democratic attributes in line with liberal, majoritarian, and authoritarian understandings. We add an outcome-oriented at- tribute relating to tax reform that may influence voters’ preferences due to trade-offs between eco- nomic interests and support for democratic standards. Moreover, we add an attribute probing cul- tural identity that provides differing candidate positions on the highly salient issue of abortion rights. Finally, we choose to include an explicit party label to probe the impact of partisanship on respondents’ evaluation of candidates’ adhesion to democratic standards. Whereas some studies suggest removing party labels completely by using hypothetical profiles to avoid triggering parti- san identification (Kirkland and Coppock 2018; McCoy, Simonovits, and Littvay 2020), we are interested precisely in assessing whether party labels drive candidate choice or interact in any other way with democratic preferences. We therefore choose to present respondents with a mix of can- didates from all parties above 5% of vote share according to polls in June 2021, with choice situ- ations also including run-offs between candidates of the same party background. We include age and gender of candidates to create more realistic profiles. Table 1 provides a full list of attributes and levels along with the corresponding theoretical rationales for inclusion. 4 Table 1. Overview of attributes and levels used in conjoint Attribute Levels Concept Female (weighted at 35%) Socio-de- Gender Male mographics Gender Gender Socio-de- Age Randomize (random integer 30-65) Age mographics Law and Justice (PiS) Poland 2050 Partisan affili- Civic Coalition (KO) Partisanship ship ship ation The Left Partisan- Confederation Tax reform should increase taxes for medium- and high- income households. Economic trade- Tax reform Tax reform should increase taxes for all households. off Tax reform should decrease taxes for low-income house- oriented oriented Outcome- holds. Abortion legislation should grant greater freedom of Abortion leg- choice to women. Women’s rights islation Abortion legislation should protect the unborn child’s life identity identity Cultural