Perceived Democraticness of Parties From Citizens’ Perspectives: Evidence From Canada

Experts consider some parties to be democratic and others undemocratic, based on criteria related to political pluralism. But we know little about how citizens perceive a party's commitment to democratic norms and whether these perceptions are vulnerable to change. Building upon the motivated reasoning literature, we answer these questions with data from a nationally representative sample in Canada - a well-regarded liberal democracy. First, our descriptive findings show that voters uniformly engage in motivated responding, perceiving their in-party as more committed to democratic norms than the out-party(-ies). Second, leveraging the 2022 Canadian trucker convoy, we prime respondents about the mainstream parties' undemocratic behaviours (according to scholarly standards). Our experiment demonstrates asymmetrical information updating that supports motivated reasoning: voters maintain their in-party perceptions but they update perceptions of out-parties to be more undemocratic if they hold strong opinions about the convoy. We discuss how these findings enrich the democratic recession literature.