Kristian Frederiksen

Can banning political ideologies protect democracy? 🛡️🆚🗣️

Our (w. @valentimvicente.bsky.social) paper finds: punishing individuals might backfire. We study a West German policy banning "extreme left" individuals from working for the state.

#Democracy #PoliticalScience

🧵

url: osf.io/usqdb_v2

Do campaigns make voters less vulnerable to framing?

Our study of Denmark’s 2022 EU referendum suggests they can. Framing effects declined as voters became more informed and drew on their own EU attitudes.

Happy to share it's now accepted in the EJPR!

Pre-print: osf.io/preprints/os...

Does Priming Democratic Vulnerability Make Citizens Punish Undemocratic Behavior? - Political Behavior Recent instances of public support for democracy-violating political leaders have sparked an important stream of research suggesting that such leaders may gain support by representing citizens’ politi...

Emphasizing that democracy itself is at risk is quite ineffective in reducing support for undemocratic behavior - experimental evidence from 10 countries now open access in @polbehavior.bsky.social

AND this adds a satisfying *The End* to my dissertation.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Stort tillykke! Meget velfortjent.

🚨 working paper (w. @morganlcj.bsky.social @markuswagner.bsky.social): Protesters are not judged equally - even if tactics of groups are similar.

We ran an experiment in 🇩🇪 testing how people react to farmers vs. climate activists blocking roads.

What we find is disturbing:

osf.io/preprints/os...

Our new paper with team DEMNORM! We show that while using hypothetical scenarios helps us isolate causal effects, this may have led us to underestimate real world support for democratic transgressions, but also the efficiency of interventions against it! ▶️Check out Kristian's summary thread 👇👇

In sum, we suggest that:

• To measure real support for transgressions and building interventions, embed violations in reality (for external validity).
• To isolate causal effects of undemocratic acts themselves, abstract hypotheticals remain useful due to information equivalence concerns.

Why? Hypothetical scenarios might suffer from a “ceiling effect”—most people already oppose abstract violations, so there’s little room to move them further. This is pretty crucial as many interventions have failed in prior studies.

In Wave 2, we nudge respondents with an intervention showing data on how many co‐citizens disapprove of democratic transgressions (plus their reasons). Against real‐world transgressions, disapproval jumped by +5 pp. But against hypotheticals, it barely moved—and even showed a tiny backlash.

Descriptive findings (Wave 1): Disapproval of real‐world violations was much lower (47.5%) than for hypothetical ones (63.7%). Familiarity, concreteness, and context really amplify partisan biases, which are heavily underestimated with hypothetical scenarios, *even when keeping party constant*.

We ran a two‐wave survey: In Wave 1, respondents saw either (a) vignettes of actual transgressions by well‐known leaders—think Trump’s election denial or Orbán’s electoral tweaks—or (b) parallel, but purely hypothetical, scenarios by hypothetical actors with assigned party.

The reason is that information equivalence concerns shift once the main goal is not isolating effects *of* democratic violations (for interventions, for example, we are estimating effects *on* support for democratic violations - such that only intervention treatments should be equivalent).

Psychological biases should be stronger in real-world scenarios *even though* hypotheticals also assign party etc. Party labels do not equate the real deal.

We suggest that a real-world approach should be particularly useful for a) descriptive inferences and b) constructing intervention outcomes.

Our theoretical framework highlights four core differences between real-world and hypothetical approaches:
• Actors (real vs. hypothetical)
• Time (past vs. future)
• Abstraction (concrete vs. abstract)
• Compounding (bundled vs. isolated)

We look into public support for democratic violations across six challenged democracies: US, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, Mexico and India. Most of our knowledge on support for undemocratic candidates/policies stems from hypothetical scenarios, where the results might not apply to real-world settings.

🛎️New WP with @morganlcj.bsky.social @timallinger.bsky.social and @danbischof.bsky.social

Against the surge of conjoints and other hypothetical experiments in relation to democratic backsliding, we study the consequences of using hypotheticals versus real-world scenarios.

osf.io/preprints/os...

BJPolS abstract from a scholarly article discussing the impact of higher education on civic engagement, suggesting that attending college leads to a significant increase in voter turnout and proposing a positive correlation with sustained civic returns.

From February 2025 -

Educating for Democracy? Going to College Increases Political Participation - cup.org/4iapbva

- @andreasvijensen.bsky.social

#OpenAccess

Diary WEEK 8

This is the most incredible commentary on what is happening in the US, by one of the most eminent political scientists on the planet. You have to read this.
open.substack.com/pub/adamprze...

Who supports free speech, and how consistent is the support? Together with @suthank.bsky.social, I’ve conducted a survey of citizens in 33 countries for The Future of Free Speech. A lot of interesting findings (see 🧵 + link): futurefreespeech.org/wp-content/u...

Congrats Amanda 🎉🎉🎉

Abstract below:

This research helps to understand Trump's (rise to) power by revealing the electoral incentives that elites perceive in relation to opposing him. Looking forward to be able to share more on this!

We also quantify the anticipated differences in breaking with Trump or Biden using various close-ended measures - the figure below shows that elites anticipate a severe vote loss after breaking with Trump, but not Biden. This was when Biden was a certain as Trump to become nominee (March 2024).

Leveraging textual responses from U.S. state legislators, challengers for Congress, and local officials (during the primaries in 2024) to scenarios with leader-opposing candidates, we compare the perceived narratives of breaking with Trump to Biden or Harris - which is seen as way less costly.

We provide a novel study centered on U.S. political elites' *causal beliefs*. We show that they *perceive* causal narratives closely resembling what Trump showcases in public using theatrical displays of power: prompt retaliation from Trump and a loyal party base make defection prohibitively costly.

En route to @ispsyale.bsky.social to present "The Power of Spectacle: What Political Elites Believe About Breaking with Donald J. Trump", which is joint work with Martin Bisgaard and @aarslew.bsky.social. Honored to be invited to present at this workshop on America's Contested Democratic Creed!

Politicians, generally - Donald Tusk and his government in this paper specifically

(PDF) Public Opinion and the Restoration of Democracy PDF | Abundant prior research has analyzed the mass public's support for, and opposition to, democratic backsliding. Comparatively little research has... | Find, read and cite all the research you nee...

Thank you! It's an OSF-thing - alternative RG-link: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

(PDF) Public Opinion and the Restoration of Democracy PDF | Abundant prior research has analyzed the mass public's support for, and opposition to, democratic backsliding. Comparatively little research has... | Find, read and cite all the research you nee...

While OSF moderates: www.researchgate.net/publication/...