Overview of today’s lecture

• The psychological pre-requisites for democracy
• Democratic values vs. applied political tolerance — a gap that matters
• The determinants of political intolerance: threat perception, internalisation, personality
• Cross-national studies: Marquart-Pyatt & Paxton (2007) — Eastern and Western Europe compared
• The democratic-learning hypothesis and its evidence
• Contemporary democratic backsliding in CEE: Hungary, Poland, Slovakia
• Affective polarisation and backsliding — Gessler & Wunsch 2025, Sadowski 2024

Why this question matters now

• The course has traced how psychological mechanisms (anomie, prejudice, in-group bias, system justification, deprivation) interact with institutional design in CEE.
• The cumulative question: are there psychological pre-requisites for democracy itself that CEE populations have, lack, or only partly hold?
• Not academic — backsliding in Hungary, Poland (2015–23), and Slovakia (2024+) makes the stakes concrete.
• The psychology of backsliding is the mirror image of democratisation.
• V-Dem 2026: 44 countries autocratising (6 of 10 new cases in Europe/North America) — yet backsliding can be reversed, most dramatically in Hungary 2026.

What democracy requires of citizens

• Democracies make demands of citizens that other forms of government do not:
  • Tolerance of fellow citizens’ participation, even when views diverge sharply
  • Participation in collective self-governance
  • Recognition of a loyal opposition — opponents are not enemies
• Today’s focus: the psychological underpinnings of the restraint that creates space for a wide range of political groups to participate; and the attitudes, values, and orientations that lead citizens to participate themselves.

Democratic values: a consensual agreement

• For democracy to exist, certain attitudes must be widespread:
  • Procedural norms: how substantive disputes are negotiated
  • Fundamental values: liberty, equality, individualism
  • Political tolerance and interpersonal trust
• Early US research:
  • Mixed results. Limited support for / understanding of democratic rules among the mass public
  • Stronger support among the better-educated and politically active — an “activist class” with the values and predispositions to sustain democracy
  • Over time, with rising education, support for democratic values rose in the mass public

Civil liberties versus political tolerance

• Historical root: tolerance evolved from efforts to moderate religious conflict — religious groups learning to “put up with” others they disliked or hated.
• Political tolerance: the same logic applied to ideological enemies.
  • Opponents need not be eliminated physically or politically
  • One need not like them, but one should tolerate them
• Applied tolerance: supporting the political rights of groups and ideologies you actively oppose and dislike.

The “least-liked group” method

• Researchers ask respondents to identify the group in politics they like the least.
• Then ask how far respondents would support that group’s civil liberties:
  • hold public office
  • teach in schools
  • hold public demonstrations
• This method reveals that the public is far less tolerant of disliked groups than generic “democratic values” questions suggest.
• Abstract support is consensual; applied support is much narrower.

The tolerance of elites

• Successive studies: political elites are more supportive of civil liberties than ordinary citizens.
• One cause: political expertise and participation — repeated engagement with the rules socialises respect for them.
• But other factors matter too: personality, threat perception, internalised values.

Threat perception

• One of the strongest direct predictors of intolerance is perceived threat.
• Two kinds:
  • Dispositional threat: some people are constitutionally prone to feel threatened (low openness, high neuroticism)
  • Situational threat: the current information environment emphasises the dangerousness of a specific group
• People with either high disposition or high situational trigger show lower tolerance.

Information environment and threat

• Group framed as violating norms (disorder, improper conduct) → even the non-predisposed refuse to tolerate it.
• Same group framed as orderly and proper → a majority often will tolerate it, even an unpopular or extremist one.
• Aggregate tolerance is malleable: media and elite portrayal decide whether citizens apply democratic values to hard cases or set them aside.

Internalising democratic values

• Early analyses: citizens are inconsistent or hypocritical. Strong abstract belief in democratic values + unwillingness to apply them to objectionable groups.
• But more recent work: internalised democratic norms make a considerable difference in determining tolerance when put to the test.
• The more completely an individual has internalised and believes in democratic norms, the more likely they are to tolerate groups and ideas they find obnoxious.
• Threat perception + strength of democratic values are both strong predictors of applied tolerance judgements.

Personality

• In addition to threat perceptions and democratic norms, personality predicts applied political tolerance:
  • Misanthropy, anomie: less tolerant
  • Self-esteem, flexibility: more tolerant
  • Dogmatism: less tolerant
  • Trust: more tolerant
• Big Five: openness to experience is the robust predictor of higher tolerance; neuroticism (via threat-sensitivity) tracks lower tolerance. Other traits, including extraversion, show weak or inconsistent effects.
• These personality effects are relatively context-independent: highly dogmatic, authoritarian personalities are intolerant regardless of where they live.

Summary: the architecture of tolerance

Tolerance in emerging democracies: Gibson (1992)

• The comparative question: are psychology–democracy links context-dependent, or do some predispositions sustain (or subvert) democracy regardless of place?
• Classic study of the former Soviet Union, early 1990s:
  • Russians supportive of general democratic norms
  • but much less tolerant than established democracies when applying them to disliked groups
  • perceived threat = by far the strongest predictor of intolerance
• Follow-up (Gibson & Duch 1993): dogmatism also increased intolerance.

Attitudes and political participation

• Ongoing debate: do civic-culture attitudes
  • cause transitions to democracy?
  • ensure that democratic regimes persist over time?
  • result from the pre-existence of democratic regimes?
• Difficult to demonstrate psychological orientations cause democracy (rather than resulting from it). Even time-series evidence does not resolve the question conclusively.

The developmental story (Inglehart)

• Inglehart (1977, 1990, 1997): economic development reshapes values in a pro-democratic direction.
• Cognitive mobilisation — rising education + service-sector work — gives citizens the skills and motivation to participate.
• With material security, a shift from materialist to post-material values (self-expression, quality of life) that sustains democracy and civil liberties.

Trust and social capital (Putnam)

• Interpersonal trust + well-being raise the level and durability of democracy:
  • trust makes a loyal opposition credible; without it, transfers of power look dangerous
• Social capital — networks, reciprocity norms, trust — yields:
  • more effective collective action and concern for public affairs
  • belief that others will act fairly and obey the law
• Where it is low: public life feels alien; corruption is expected.

Marquart-Pyatt & Paxton (2007)

• Marquart-Pyatt, S. & Paxton, P. (2007). In Principle and in Practice: Learning Political Tolerance in Eastern and Western Europe. Political Behavior, 29(1), 89–113.
• 14 countries: 5 Western European, 8 Eastern European, 1 United States.
• Core finding: espoused support for democracy in EE ≈ Western levels; but political tolerance (applied) is lower in EE.

The democratic-learning hypothesis and its test

• Hypothesis: tolerance must be learned — via contact with diverse groups and exposure to democratic institutions.
• Age-cohort test: if so, those educated under democracy should be more tolerant — expected in EE, not the West (all cohorts democratic there).
  • EE cohorts: educated under democracy (post-1989) / under the “thawed” post-1956 period / under neither.
• Data: WVS 1995–97; DV = applied tolerance toward each respondent’s least-liked group, across public office / teaching / demonstrations.

Descriptive findings

• Espoused support for democracy is almost identical across groups.
• But applied tolerance is substantially lower in Eastern Europe — roughly half the Western level on several items.
• The gap between espoused support and applied tolerance is a CEE signature.

Regression findings and interpretation

• Standard predictors (education, urban residence, interest, espoused democracy, activism) are strong in the US, weaker in WE, much weaker in CEE; national pride and protectionism predict lower tolerance.
• Age-cohort effect confirms democratic learning in CEE — education under democracy raises tolerance (no such effect in the West).
• Why weaker in CEE? Institutional uncertainty — people won’t risk tolerance if they doubt others will reciprocate.
• The tolerance-coordination problem: tolerance is an equilibrium.

From learning to unlearning

• Marquart-Pyatt & Paxton’s data are from 1995–97. The prediction was that continued exposure to democracy would raise tolerance in CEE over subsequent decades.
• Partly confirmed (gender attitudes, homosexuality acceptance) — see Lecture 13.
• Partly inverted: since 2010, several CEE countries have experienced democratic backsliding, with governing parties rolling back civil liberties and undermining opposition rights.
• Hungary (Fidesz, 2010–2026), Poland (PiS, 2015–2023), Slovakia (Fico, 2024+), and Serbia: backsliding that returns salience to the question of democratic psychological foundations.

Backsliding and applied tolerance

• The Marquart-Pyatt–Paxton “applied tolerance” measure catches something backsliding shifts.
• If governing parties repeatedly portray opposition as illegitimate, citizens’ applied tolerance decreases:
  • opposition figures become “traitors”, “agents of foreign powers”
  • civil society becomes “enemies of the nation”
  • independent media becomes “fake news”
• Information environment (as Marquart-Pyatt & Paxton predicted) moves applied tolerance in the opposite direction when deployed against democratic norms.

Affective polarisation

• Recent work: affective polarisation — emotional dislike of out-parties and their supporters — is central to backsliding.
• Partisan-based affective polarisation explains citizens’ tolerance of democratic backsliding: voters are more willing to overlook democratic violations when they come from their in-party.
• Gessler & Wunsch (2025, EJPR 64(4): 1593–1617) reverse the usual arrow: backsliding itself generates affective polarisation organised around democracy.
  • Sustained erosion opens a “new regime divide” — a democracy cleavage that cuts across the old left–right axis.
  • In Hungary this lets an ideologically diverse opposition coalesce in defence of liberal democracy itself; Poland (in their appendix) shows a weaker version.
• Backsliding → polarisation → further tolerance decline → further backsliding is a feedback loop — but, as 2026 shows, not a closed one.

Rising support for democracy despite backsliding

• Sadowski (2024): trend in Polish attitudes toward democracy 1995–2021 shows rising diffuse support for democracy.
• This occurs even through years of PiS-era institutional erosion.
• One interpretation: visible backsliding raises the value citizens place on democracy — they see what is being taken away.
• Generational replacement compounds the effect: younger Polish cohorts support democracy at higher rates than older cohorts.
• The 2023 electoral reversal expressed these attitudinal shifts — but the 2025 presidential election checked them: PiS-backed Nawrocki won, and his veto (with no government supermajority to override it) has largely stalled re-democratisation.

What the Hungarian, Polish and Slovak cases show (2023–2026)

• Poland: 2023 reversal stalled — PiS-backed Nawrocki won the 2025 presidency; his veto + no government supermajority = gridlock.
• Slovakia: Fico has scrapped the NAKA anti-corruption police, passed a media law, and moved against NGOs/protest — met by the “Chalk Revolution” (≈40,000 in Bratislava, Nov 2025).
• Hungary: the most entrenched case reversed at the ballot box — 12 Apr 2026, Magyar’s Tisza took a two-thirds majority (53.6%); Orbán out after 16 years.
• The strongest confirmation of Gessler & Wunsch: backsliding built the cross-ideological pro-democracy coalition their model predicts — and it won.

The psychological underpinnings revisited

• The course has argued throughout: the same psychology (in-group identity, relative deprivation, social learning, collective memory) produces pro-democratic and anti-democratic outcomes depending on framing and institutional channelling.
• Democratic backsliding is not caused by a new psychological deficit. It is caused by successful political entrepreneurs exploiting the mechanisms the course has traced, under favourable conditions.
• The question for the next decade is whether the counter-mechanisms — applied tolerance, internalised democratic values, civic engagement — can be re-mobilised at scale.
• Guasti & Michal (2025) find polarisation in Central Europe mobilised citizens for democracy more strongly than for autocracy (e.g. the 2023 Czech presidential election) — the counter-mechanisms are not hypothetical.
• Hungary 2026 is a proof of concept: under the right conditions they can be re-mobilised and win — though Poland’s 2025 stall shows the outcome is never guaranteed.

Conclusions

• The gap between abstract support and applied tolerance is universal — and especially wide in CEE.
• Applied tolerance turns on threat perception, internalised democratic values, personality, education, and experience of democratic institutions; democratic learning raises it.
• Backsliding runs the same machinery in reverse — but, as Hungary 2026 shows, the counter-mechanisms can win.