No dia 6 de fevereiro, Lisa Janssen (Ghent University) será a oradora do Seminário do Grupo de Investigação SPARC. Na Sala 2 do ICS-ULisboa e online.

While most people across the globe express their support for democracy as the preferable form of governance, recent studies reveal that a significant proportion of the citizenry is willing to trade their cherished democratic principles for desired political gains. This raises the question: What motivates citizens to sacrifice the democratic principles they profess to hold dear? In this paper, we develop an interactive and relational understanding of citizens’ democratic attitudes by introducing the concept of reciprocity in the context of democratic transgressions. Drawing from psychological theories about negative reciprocity, we argue that in response to a democratic transgression by the political opponent, citizens become more likely to support reciprocal democratic violations and hence condone attempts of democratic erosion by their own political camp. Using survey experiments in England (N = 4.040) and the US (N = 4.084), we show that citizens who are exposed to democratic transgressions of political opponents are twice as likely to endorse undemocratic behaviour by their own party. Moreover, we document that tendencies to reciprocate transgressions are independent of citizens’ affective polarization levels. These findings suggest a potentially dangerous feedback loop, where opponents’ democratic violations can trigger further undemocratic responses. Moreover, our study highlights the need for a more dynamic approach to the study of democratic attitudes.

Lisa Janssen is a PhD candidate at Ghent University, affiliated with the Department of Political Science and the GASPAR research group. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of political psychology, political behaviour, and comparative politics, with a particular focus on understanding citizens’ commitments to democratic procedures and principles. In her dissertation, she examines how affective polarization influences citizens’ willingness to prioritize political gain over democratic values. Lisa’s work has been published in leading international peer-reviewed journals, such as the European Journal of Political Research, Political Behavior, and Acta Politica.