Enrique Hernández

Comparative Political Studies (2026). The literature analyzing the impact of winning and losing elections on individuals' political support has predominantly focused on the gap in satisfaction with democracy. Using this as a benchmark, in this paper we analyze if these winner-loser dynamics extend to citizens' support for principles related to norms of democratic restraint and consent, and how partisan animus might reinforce these dynamics. We propose that partisan animus will deplete the "reservoir of goodwill" that helps winners and losers accept norms and procedures that may go against their self-interest, such as those related to winners' restraint and losers' consent. Based on CSES data for 24 elections, we find that contrary to our expectations, winners and losers do not differ in their support for unrestrained majority rule vis-a-vis the protection of the rights of minorities, or in their likelihood of favoring a strong leader willing to bypass legal constraints. This is the case even among highly affectively polarized individuals. These comparative cross-sectional findings are substantiated through a quasi-experimental case study that exploits the coalition shifts occurred during the 2017 New Zealand post-election negotiations. These findings have positive implications for our current understanding of winners' restraint and losers' consent in contemporary democracies.

European Journal of Political Research, 64(4), 2018–2038 (2025). Recent studies suggest that citizens are unlikely to trade off free elections for other desirable outcomes, such as economic growth. However, while free elections are central to democracies, today democracy is not often undermined by abolishing elections. Our study shifts the focus to citizens' willingness to trade off the more granular democratic principles frequently eroded in backsliding processes — such as judicial independence, media freedom, or horizontal accountability — for higher incomes. Through a seven country conjoint experiment, we analyze how citizens prioritize among these principles and estimate their "willingness to pay" — or the additional income needed to persuade citizens to give these principles up. We find that while citizens do not relinquish free elections easily, they are more open to forgo liberal principles undermined in backsliding processes, especially when these principles are eroded gradually, one at a time. These findings help explain why democratic backsliding may be often tolerated by citizens.

European Political Science Review, 17(1), 61–79 (2025). While elections are an instrument to hold politicians accountable, corrupt politicians are often re-elected. A potential explanation for this paradox is that citizens trade off integrity for competence. Voters may forgive corruption if corrupt politicians manage to deliver desirable outcomes. While previous studies have examined whether politicians' competence moderates the negative effect of corruption, this paper focuses on voters' priorities and directly assesses what citizens value more: integrity or favourable outcomes. Using a survey experiment, we assess citizens' support for politicians who violate the law in order to improve the welfare of their community and, in some cases, benefit personally from these violations. The results indicate that citizens prefer a politician who follows the law, even if this leads to a sub-optimal outcome. However, voters are more likely to overlook violations of the law that benefit the community if these do not result in a personal gain for politicians (i.e., in the absence of corruption). These findings suggest that the mild electoral punishment of corruption may be due to the public's unawareness of private gains from malfeasance, or to the delay in these private benefits becoming apparent by election day.

In: Ferrín & Kriesi (Eds.), How Europeans View and Evaluate Democracy Revisited: Ten Years Later. Oxford University Press (2025). Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS), this chapter examines the stability and change in Europeans' views of democracy between 2012 and 2021. It analyzes the importance citizens attribute to different elements of democracy, including electoral, liberal, social, direct, and populist components. The results show continued high support for core democratic elements such as free elections and the rule of law, as well as high support for the populist elements of democracy. However, there is some decline in the importance attributed to social democratic elements and direct democracy, likely influenced by economic and political developments such as the economic recovery after the Great Recession and the Brexit referendum. Overall, the chapter shows that Europeans remain committed to democracy. Rather than turning their backs on democracy, Europeans are still quite demanding about what democracy ought to be.

The erosion of checks and balances is one of the defining traits of democratic backsliding. Aspiring autocrats in countries like Poland, Hungary or Israel have weakened the powers of the courts vis-à-vis the executive, and they have usually done so in the name of popular sovereignty. This paper explores the tension between the rule of law and popular sovereignty from the perspective of citizens. Are citizens ready to accept the constraints to popular sovereignty imposed by the rule of law through horizontal accountability mechanisms and judicial independence? Under which circumstances are voters willing to trade-off the rule of law for more popular sovereignty? We explore these questions through an original pre-registered observational study in 15 European countries that introduces innovative measurement strategies aimed at evaluating citizens' views of the democratic trade-off between popular sovereignty and the rule of law. This evidence is complemented with a pre-registered conjoint experiment on judicial review fielded in four countries. Preliminary results reveal that instrumental considerations are the key factor that makes citizens more open to trading-off the rule of law by popular sovereignty.

To protect themselves, democracies may restrict the rights of individuals or groups who seek to undermine this political system. However, despite a growing normative consensus about the legitimacy of such measures, public opinion on these restrictions remains largely underexplored. In this paper we focus on one of the most extreme manifestations of such militant restrictions on democracy: the banning of political parties. Specifically, we analyze whether and why citizens believe that democracies can legitimately ban certain political parties. To this end, we conducted an observational study and two survey experiments in 15 European democracies, complemented by an additional conjoint experiment in four of these countries. In these experiments, we manipulated: (i) the ideological orientation of parties promoting anti-democratic proposals; (ii) the intensity and nature of these proposals; and (iii) the popular support these parties enjoy. The findings reveal that Europeans are deeply divided over the legitimacy of banning political parties, with some citizens opposing such bans even for parties that openly advocate for overthrowing democracy. The results also reveal that these opinions are mainly influenced by citizens' own partisan biases and their perceptions of the "real democratic threat" posed by these parties.

Recent studies have attempted to reveal citizens' true commitment to democratic norms and principles. We contribute to this strand of literature by analyzing the volatility and conditionality of citizens' commitment to democratic norms and principles. First, we assess how aspects related to political sophistication may generally make citizens support for democratic norms and principles more volatile. Second, we examine how value-laden and affect-laden out-group considerations may condition and shift citizens' preferences away from core democratic norms and principles. For these purposes, we focus specifically on citizens' commitment to protecting the rights of minorities, protecting people from hate speech, and promoting political equality through quotas. To capture citizens' general preferences about these principles we first employ original survey items that leverage a trade-off framing that pits these principles and norms against other incompatible democratic principles. Next, we randomly relate these norms and principles to particular groups (e.g., women, migrants, homosexuals, Muslims…) that may elicit different value- and affect-laden considerations among respondents. This reinforces the intrinsic tension that each trade-off involves and allows us to probe on the conditionality of citizens' commitment to these key democratic principles.

The right to protest is a key democratic principle and a central element of the participatory model of democracy. However, we have witnessed an increasing debate about the limits of this right, not only in backsliding democracies but also in consolidated ones, where some protests have been recently banned and repressed. But, unlike other contested democratic rights such as free speech, we know little about the extent to which the public may be willing to accept limitations of the right to protest and the factors that may drive citizens' preferences about the boundaries of this right. In this study we unpack the multidimensionality of protests in order to assess whether and how citizens' may be open to curtailing this democratic right. For this purpose, we field a series of factorial vignette experiments in four European countries with different "protest cultures": Spain, Italy, Belgium, and the Czech Republic. Through these experiments we manipulate the characteristics of the protests in multiple dimensions: their size, popular support, and the potential negative side-effects of the protest. Through these analyses we explore if citizens' support for the right to protest is conditional on these characteristics of protests, and if these characteristics can reinforce or offset each other depending on citizens' pre-existing attitudes.

Citizens are expected to hold corrupt politicians accountable. However, while observational studies and field experiments often find corrupt politicians re-elected, survey experiments show that citizens are unlikely to vote for corrupt candidates. This contradiction may arise because previous studies have not accounted for how citizens navigate political information in the real world. In this paper, we propose a model of corruption accountability that considers how citizens selectively engage with political information. We test this model using a PICA experimental design fielded in Spain. The results indicate that information selection can explain the limited consequences of corruption scandals, as not all citizens expose themselves to corruption information, and their likelihood to hold corrupt politicians accountable depends on their information preferences. These findings suggest corruption accountability may be increased not by informing those who select out of counter-attitudinal information, but by reaching inattentive citizens generally not exposed to political information.