Public support for democracy and different patterns of democratic backsliding

This paper examines whether public support for democracy helps constrain two common patterns of democratic backsliding: executive aggrandizement and strategic electoral manipulation. Previous studies often rely on aggregate democracy indices, but such measures may mask the specific ways backsliding occurs by collapsing multiple dimensions into a single score. This paper argues that while public support may not improve the overall quality of democracy, it can nonetheless help constrain executive aggrandizement and electoral manipulation. Drawing on panel data covering more than 30 years of public support for democracy across 141 countries, combined with data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, we focus on three measures of democratic quality: clean elections and judicial and legislative constraints on executive power. The results show that public support is not significantly associated with the Liberal Democracy Index, but in democracies it is positively associated with electoral integrity and institutional checks on executive power. These findings offer a more nuanced understanding of democratic resilience, showing that while public support may not improve democracy overall, it can still matter for constraining backsliding in targeted institutional domains.