Voters say they value democracy, yet governments that weaken courts and watchdogs rarely pay a price. Filippo Palmieri argues that the reason is not indifference but a majoritarian idea of democracy, in which stripping an elected government of its constraints counts as a mandate fulfilled
In several European countries, governments have curbed the courts and tightened their grip on public broadcasting. Their voters still returned them to office. The obvious explanation, that people have stopped caring about democracy, does not match the results of surveys, which still find broad support for it.
I argue that many voters have not given up on democracy at all. They understand it as majority rule. On that understanding, an elected government that removes its own constraints is not breaking the rules. It is doing what it was elected to do.
Nancy Bermeo showed that the coup has given way to a slower method. Elected executives expand their power step by step, through changes that, on the face of it, look legal. Freedom House recorded a twentieth consecutive year of decline in global freedom in 2025. Among the causes, it lists efforts to weaken constitutional safeguards, alongside coups and violence against protesters.
Courts are the pivot. Studying episodes of autocratisation from 1900 to 2019, Vanessa Boese-Schlosser and colleagues find judicial constraints associated with resilience in avoiding the onset of autocratisation and in averting breakdown once it has begun. They describe the courts as a last bulwark. The other brake is the electorate. When voters do not treat an assault on the judiciary as a reason to withdraw support, that bulwark is left without political cover.
Populists in government capture, dismantle, sabotage and reform public administration in the name of 'giving the state back' to the people who voted for them
The method reaches past the courts. Michael Bauer and Stefan Becker distinguish four things populists in government can do to public administration: capture, dismantling, sabotage and reform. Each can be presented as giving the state back to the people who voted.
Poland is the case that matters most here. Elections stayed competitive through years of backsliding, so voters had a real opportunity to punish the government. Natasha Wunsch, Marc Jacob and Laurenz Derksen ran a candidate-choice conjoint experiment there. Respondents who adhere less strongly to liberal democratic norms tolerated democratic violations more readily. Those with a stronger liberal understanding were likelier to punish non-liberal candidates, including candidates from their own party.
This finding shifts the question. What decides whether a violation costs votes is not only partisanship. It is what the voter thinks democracy requires.
That belief varies more than headline figures suggest. Drawing on World Values Survey data, Hannah Chapman and colleagues show that individual definitions differ widely, and that support for democracy is higher among those who include civil liberties alongside elections.
Evidence from the United States points the same way. Anna Lührmann reports one striking figure from a 2020 survey: 41% of Americans agreed that the president should be able to act without bothering with institutional procedure, if a large majority of Americans believe he should. Guy Grossman and colleagues tested the idea directly in two survey experiments. Many voters, they conclude, are majoritarian: they treat the actions of elected leaders as democratic by definition, even when those actions undermine liberal democracy. Partisanship still shields one’s own side, but majoritarianism does work of its own, and the focus on polarisation has left it understudied.
Many voters treat the actions of elected leaders as democratic by definition, even when those actions undermine liberal democracy
These studies are American, and a single Polish experiment settles nothing on its own. But together they indicate that conceptions of democracy shape how violations are judged. My own claim goes a step further and remains a hypothesis. For a majoritarian voter, an attack on a court may not register as a cost at all. It may register as democracy working.
None of this makes voters irrational. Majority rule is a real democratic principle, not a misunderstanding of one. The trouble starts when it is taken for the whole of democracy, which also asks what a majority may not do to the minority living under it.
To a majoritarian voter, calling courts and regulators 'democratic safeguards' sounds like a contradiction: unelected officials obstructing an elected government
There is a lesson here for anyone defending courts and regulators. Calling them 'democratic safeguards' convinces the people who already agree. To a majoritarian voter, the phrase sounds like a contradiction: unelected officials obstructing an elected government. The case has to be made in that voter’s own terms. Limits on power are what keep power reversible. Those limits protect the majority of the future, not only the minority of the present. A majority that lets its government take the courts may find it can no longer vote that government out.
Until that argument is made, every captured court will be counted as a promise kept.
