Are Citizens Inoculated by Past Democratic Backsliding?

Abstract

Across the world, elected governments are dismantling the liberal democracies they inherited. Can these democratic backsliding episodes inoculate citizens into liberal democrats vigilant against future relapses? Because scholars have yet to resolve this puzzle, we lack crucial information to gauge the prospects of democratic resilience. We develop this "democratic inoculation thesis" into a testable theory and assess its validity in the critical case of Slovakia – a backsliding democracy that previously experienced democratic erosion and is often cited as a likely case of democratic inoculation. Through a survey experiment prompting Slovak citizens to reflect on democratic backsliding in the 1990s, we assess whether these reflections heighten their vigilance over their current government and bolster their support for liberal democratic norms. We also evaluate whether factors like affective polarization and education condition democratic inoculation.