How democratically elected politicians get away with autocratizing Hungary

If voters had to choose between supporting democracy and adhering to party loyalty or policy interests, what do they choose? With an experimental research design developed by Prof. Milan Svolik (Yale University) to simulate real-world-voting scenarios, we surveyed 1000 Hungarian respondents in order to find out who would put democracy above all else, and what issues voters are prepared to trade-off democracy for.

This report builds on our previous conjoint experiment1 of seven European countries (Estonia, Germany, Poland, Serbia, Sweden, Spain and Ukraine) and looks in depth at the case of Hungary. It seeks to answer the question: Why do voters continue to support politicians who violate democratic principles? And is voters’ willingness to prioritize policy issues over democracy increased by polarization?

Authored by Elena Avramovska, András Bíró-Nagy, Ludwig List, Johanna Lutz, Milan Svolik, and Áron Szászi.