Reactions to US liberal backsliding

The United States, long regarded as a stable liberal democracy, is now experiencing rapid and far-reaching backsliding. The liberal pillar of American democracy -- especially the protection of gender equality, minority rights, and civil liberties -- is eroding. How do citizens around the world respond to this decline? We answer this question via two causal strategies. First, we leverage a quasi-experiment using individual-level data (N=32,080) from thirty-five countries to causally identify how exposure to attacks on women's rights undermine the US' standing among the citizens of core European allies. Second, we rely on a pre-registered vignette experiment in Britain (N=2,993) to show that exposure to news about attacks on civil liberties and LGBTQ+ rights, depresses the world's view of the US as a democracy. Our experimental results also demonstrate that liberal backsliding, particularly attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, has downstream consequences: it undermines public willingness to engage in collaboration with the US. This response is motivated by updating views on the US' compliance with shared liberal values rather than fear of backsliding at home. These findings show that liberal backsliding in the US has global consequences. When a leading democracy undermines liberal values, it weakens respect abroad, erodes its reputation, and reduces public support for cooperation. Attacks on women's and LGBTQ+ rights harm not only those targeted within the US, but US as a whole.