The democratic ideal under stress: Citizen commitment to democratic rights and procedures in challenging times

To what extent do citizens support democratic rights and procedures in the face of major societal challenges? Drawing on a Dahlian ideal of democracy, we exploit the context of the Covid-19 pandemic to address this question with two preregistered survey experiments covering 9,000 respondents in six countries (Germany, Hungary, Japan, Poland, South Korea, and Spain). A conjoint experiment on preferences for pandemic policies reveals that citizens strongly oppose restrictions that interfere with their private lives but are largely indifferent to constraints on core democratic rights (elections, rallies, freedom of the press). A framing experiment assessing citizens’ procedural preferences, elicited using best-worst scaling, shows that expert and business input are consistently ranked higher than parliamentary votes or partisan consensus – regardless of whether Covid-19, climate change, or generic ‘societal challenges’ are at stake. We discuss alternative readings of our results and conclude that commitment to democracy does not appear particularly robust when citizens confront concrete crisis-related trade-offs, with largely similar patterns across countries. While our findings diverge from those of some other experimental studies, they are broadly consistent with accounts that point to rising technocratic preferences, concerns about stealth democracy, and risks of gradual democratic erosion rather than abrupt autocratic shifts.