Social norm interventions increase resistance to real-world anti-democratic elite behavior

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Comparative politics Seminar Series features a presentation by Daniel Bischof, Professor in Comparative Politics at the University of Münster and Associate Professor at Aarhus University

Can social norm interventions increase resistance to anti-democratic tendencies? This paper presents evidence from a two-wave experimental study conducted in five countries. We develop a social norms intervention based on the first wave and deploy it against real-world instances of anti-democratic elite behavior in the second wave, presenting messages that reflect strong public opposition along with the most frequent justifications for rejecting the behavior extracted by large language models (LLMs). We find that this social norm intervention increases individual opposition to real-world anti-democratic practices by elites and even reduces vote intention for the real-world undemocratic perpetrator. Our findings demonstrate the potential of norm-based messaging to strengthen democratic resilience and counteract the normalization of authoritarian practices, even in politically polarized environments.

This is co-authored work with Kristian Frederiksen, Tim Lars Allinger, and Morgan Le Corre Juratic.