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Pro-democratic civil society organizations working under authoritarian conditions attempt to do much with few resources. Without democratic state institutions, they must undertake functions necessary for democratisation and democratic consolidation, such as providing civic education and coordinating democratic mobilisation. On the other hand, however, the lack of resources and legal guarantees usually confine them to metropolitan areas and upper-middle-class constituencies. One way out of this conundrum may be using social media. Billions of people worldwide, from nearly all social backgrounds and countries, use social media websites daily. Most civil society organisations have social media profiles as well. However, social media design does not make it easy for these organisations to reach citizens who are not following the organisations’ social media profiles. An alternative path of using social media for organisations is advertising on these platforms, as many commercial companies do. Our project explores whether paid social media advertisements can offer a path for pro-democratic civil society organisations to extend their influence and contribute to democratic development. Our project will use social media advertisements to mobilise democratic-minded citizens to preserve democratic institutions in Turkey. We will rely on data collected by one of Turkey’s leading nonpartisan civil society organisations working in electoral integrity, Vote & Beyond (V&B). Their principal goal is mobilising Turkish citizens to serve as election monitors in their neighbourhoods, reducing electoral fraud. Although Turkish law allows all political parties to register citizens as election monitors, it requires significant coordination to register monitors for all the ballot boxes across the country. Opposition parties usually fail to register monitors in areas lacking strong grassroots organisations. Using their nonpartisan credits, V&B aims to reach democratic-minded citizens and recruit them to serve as election monitors. Our project will study V&B’s online advertisement campaigns' success recruiting election monitors in the upcoming Turkish election, scheduled to be held on 15 May 2023. At the beginning of the election campaign period, V&B will publish a social media advertisement campaign using their own Facebook (including Instagram) profile and advertisement materials. The advertisement campaign will invite social media users to leave their contact information on V&B’s webpage as an expression of interest to become an election monitor. The goal of our study is to experimentally assess whether social media campaigns are effective in these kinds of recruitment efforts. The advertisement materials will be shown based on district-level random assignment, allowing us to measure the success of the advertisement campaign rigorously. At the end of the advertisement campaign, V&B will share the number of volunteers they have recruited at the district level. No personal data will be shared by the organisation, only aggregated information. Our research team will then analyse whether or not the advertisement campaign significantly increased the number of volunteers in the treated administrative units.

This is an addendum to our original pre-registration at https://osf.io/pejzx

This pre-analysis plan registers a study aiming to explore how a country’s political polarization may facilitate or impede the impacts of online civic education, and how civic education affects, and interacts with, individual-level partisan attitudes to produce changes in democratic orientations and behaviors. We argue that in less polarized contexts – where society does not consist of antagonistic camps with strong differences on fundamental political views – civic education interventions will be more effective in inducing positive changes in democratic orientations. Second, we argue that civic education should decrease individuals’ levels of “affective polarization”, or the tendency to evaluate out-parties and out-party partisans extremely negatively relative to one’s own party (Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012). Third, we argue that individuals with greater levels of affective polarization, and those who identify with less democratically-oriented political parties, will be less receptive to pro-democratic civic education messages. This project contributes to recent work on civic education and citizens' political attitudes and behavior around the world, as many countries are experiencing democratic backsliding, arguably driven in part by eroding democratic support, values, knowledge and behaviors among citizens. This portion of the project will speak also to the extensive recent literature on the role of partisan attitudes and affective polarization in democratic backsliding (e.g. Graham and Svolik 2020). Much of this work details how individuals appear to be willing to tolerate violations of democratic norms by elected officials of their own camp or preferred party, and in so doing fail to impede a country’s drift into democratic decline caused by elite misbehavior. If civic education can mitigate feelings of affective polarization then we will have uncovered another way that civic education has the potential to help forestall democratic backsliding. The project examines the impact of civic education on a series of outcomes related to: support for democracy, support for non-democratic regime alternatives, willingness to defend democracy by voting against candidates who violated democratic norms; and perceptions of the supply of democracy in the country. In this paper we will focus on macro and micro-level polarization as conditioning factors which influence the magnitude of civic education treatments on these dimensions of support for democracy. We will also consider the impact of civic education treatments on indicators of individual-level affective polarization as well.

This study will examine the impact of loss-gain frames used in civic education campaigns in a multi-country study. The content of the videos focuses on the “rights” dimension of democracy. We frame the information in terms of “gains” or “losses” based on prospect theory. In total, participants will be randomly allocated to one of three videos: 1) loss-framed rights video, 2) gain-framed rights video and 3) placebo. This study builds on Finkel-Neundorf-Rascon (AJPS, 2023) and Ozturk-Finkel-Neundorf-Rascon (working paper, 2023) where they find that loss-gain frames can be effective at increasing democratic values. Based on theoretical work on prospect theory by Kahneman and Tversky (1979), our study will extend this research by evaluating to what extent treatment effects of loss-gain civic education (CE) campaigns depend on reference points. We will identify reference points at the macro and individual level. Macro level reference points will be defined using an objective measure of the current level of democracy of the country, using the V-Dem liberal democracy index. Micro level reference points will be defined using subjective data on how the study’s participant perceives the current level of democracy in the country and what is the expected level they believe the country will experience in 5 years’ time. Both measures of micro (individual) reference points will be collected prior to the exposure to the interventions. In total, we will consider 3 types of reference points: macro (country) level of current situation, micro (individual) assessment of current situation and individual expectations about the future. For all three types of reference points we will distinguish Low, Medium, and High levels.

Civic education (CE) is important an effort in strengthening the resilience of existing and new democracies. However, little is known about 1) whether these programs can be conducted online (instead of traditionally in-person), 2) what is the best frame to promote democracy, and 3) whether there are contextual differences in the impact of these interventions. Our project aims to answer these questions through online experiments, which will be conducted in more than 30 countries, representing varying levels of democratic and economic development. Respondents will be recruited via social media and will be randomly shown one of three treatment videos, promoting different aspects of democracy (civic rights, separation of power, provision of economic and public goods) or a placebo treatment, before answering a series of questions about their understanding and support for democracy and autocracy. We expect the national context of respondents to influence the impact of our interventions, whereby the effects should be strongest if respondents face a democratic or developmental deficit. Our study will be the most comprehensive study ever conducted in the field of civic education, allowing us to explore why democracy promotion works better in some countries than others. Research questions: 1. Does online CE work and which frame works best? 2. In what context does CE work? 3. Does matching CE content and context help?

Amidst a contemporary global wave of democratic backsliding, citizens in many countries continue to support and vote for political leaders and parties that undermine democracy (e.g., Maerz 2020). This could indicate that many citizens are less committed to democracy than what has been commonly assumed. Recent studies suggest that citizen's are willing to accept violations of democracy in exchange for some other desired political outcome, such as partisan interests, salient political issues or political competence (Graham 2020, Carey 2020, Frederiksen 2022). Yet, others suggest that citizens support tolerate non-democratic behavior not because they do not care (enough) about democracy, but because they consider attacks on democracy as being inherently democratic (Grossman 2022, Krishnarajan 2022). For instance, it has been suggested that those who support strong-men such as Donald Trump hold a ``majoritarian view of democracy``, according to which attacks on institutions such as executive constraints and rule of law are not considered undemocratic if carried out by popularly elected leaders (Grossman 2022). Hence, rather than citizens being openly opposed to democracy, they may consider ongoing practices in their countries as being democratic in nature. These insights speak to the need to gain a better understanding of what citizens perceive as democratic and what factors shape citizens assessments of democratic quality. We shed light on these questions, by offering a systematic study of how various societal characteristics influence citizens' views on the state of democracy. While previous work on citizens' commitments to democracy have studied the (non-democratic) behavior and statements of hypothetical political leaders or candidates for office, we shift the focus to studying democracy as one trait at the country/societal level. This allows us to study how citizens assessments of democratic quality is shaped by a more complex, comprehensive assessment of various aspects of society, such as political factors, economic security, crime or cultural aspects such as diversity and gender equality.

Are citizens willing to trade democratic institutions and practices for more authoritarian alternatives? And if yes, what is it that they prioritize and why? To answer these questions, we conduct a conjoint experiment, exposing respondents from 30 different countries -- representing both democracies and autocracies -- to a series of hypothetical country profiles, whereby we vary the attributes of these countries on the following dimensions: political institutions and civic rights, cultural-social characteristics, and economic and non-economic security. Respondents are then asked to rate the quality of life in each country. We further explore whether country characteristics of where the respondent lives and individual attributes of the respondent affect the evaluation of these hypothetical countries. This paper contributes to our understanding of regime support by taking into account the complexity of society that people face. We further provide a test of the micro mechanism of this evaluation, presenting results from a unique experiment conducted in numerous countries.

Is nostalgia a threat to democracy? In this project, we aim to test the effects of different types of nostalgia on attitudes towards democracy and populism. More specifically, we argue that yearning for a non-liberal past paves the way for non-liberal attitudes today. However, we still do not fully understand how nostalgia is linked to democratic decay. This project will hence focus on two specific questions: 1) Who is reacting to nostalgia and 2) what are the mechanisms that connect nostalgia for specific regime experiences and political attitudes today? To test this argument, we will conduct a series of online survey experiments fielded in six different countries: The UK, Turkey, Hungary, Czech Republic, Spain and Brazil.

How much does economic inequality affect citizens’ political resentment? We understand political resentment as a multi-faceted concept including support for the democratic system, populism, governmental trust, and anti-immigration attitudes. Much of the literature in this field focuses on individual income inequality. However, we observe increasing regional clustering of populist votes and anti-globalization attitudes. Therefore, the questions motivating this paper are: 1) is political support more affected by individual or regional inequalities? And 2) what is the interaction between the two? Disentangling the direct and joint effects of individual and regional inequality allow us to test novel hypotheses on why local contexts affect individual attitudes. Our theoretical and empirical setup will allow us to disentangle whether income-maximisation motivations (relative purchasing power or prospects of social mobility) or social integration mechanisms (social distrust, social status, or perceptions of social unfairness) explain the effect of individual economic circumstances across declining or well-performing local contexts. To test our hypotheses, we will draw on a large-scale, original, and randomised survey experiment in Great Britain.

This registration documents the planned data collection and analysis for a study exploring the effective use of Facebook advertisements to recruit survey participants in Spain. The plan was written and submitted for registration before any data collection and analysis commenced.

This is a pre-registration, presenting our plans for the data collection and analysis for a study that will explore the effective use of Facebook advertisements to recruit survey participants from hard to-reach populations.

This project aims to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the civic education literature on democratic citizenship. You can reach the pre-registration document under the Files folder.

This document presents the pre-analysis plan of a comparative study exploring the effective use of Facebook advertisement tools for comparative survey research. This plan was written before any data collection and analysis. Our research design has been approved by the Ethics Committee of the College of Social Sciences at the University ofGlasgow on January 24, 2021

Are populist radical right parties a real threat to democracy? This question is partly behind the overwhelming interest that radical right parties have generated in scholarly work, at least in comparison to other party families. Surprisingly, however, the answer remains ambiguous. The literature on radical right parties distinguishes between extreme and populist radical right. Supporters of the former are assumed to have inherently anti-democratic values and preferences for authoritarian forms of government. By contrast, the latter are expected to agree with democracy as a system but dispute the legitimacy of elites and liberal institutions in favour of people-centric forms of government. In practice, however, the role of anti-democratic values and preferences for authoritarian forms of government has been difficult to isolate in previous studies. Some of the methodological challenges include social desirability in classical survey questions on democratic attitudes, and the confounding between anti-democratic preferences with other ideological traits like xenophobia and sexism. In this contribution we run a variation of an endorsement experiment in Spain, allowing us to quantify the weight of socially sensitive preferences among voters of the radical right party VOX. Our experiment consists of measuring support for public subsidies for social and cultural associations, while randomly varying the organization receiving those benefits across treatments. More specifically, we will vary the recipients of public funds like the Francisco Franco foundation (an institution representing nostalgia for a non-democratic past), and several other social organizations representing ideological values that are known to trigger VOX support and that will act here as benchmarks to contrast effect magnitudes (Catalan secessionism, immigrant rights, feminist values, and trade unionism). We will further apply an item count experiment to further test the support for the Franco Foundation among different voters. If the treatment activating authoritarian nostalgia (vs the control group) generates stronger support levels among VOX voters than among other kinds of voters, we will be able to conclude that the distinction between extreme and populist radical right is more muddled than often assumed. This will have important implications for serious democratic backsliding in the event of such parties reaching governmental offices.

Will the Covid-19 crisis affect the outcome of the 2020 US Presidential election beyond partisanship and other well-known determinants of electoral outcomes? And if so, why? The global Coronavius outbreak is an unprecedented crisis affecting various politically relevant areas. Firstly, it is a health crisis, with unseen consequences in fatalities and pressures on national health systems, putting enormous expectation and strain on national governments to manage this crisis. Secondly, the economic consequences of the pandemic far surpass the impact of the financial crisis in 2008, with national debt mounting, GDP plummeting, and unemployment rising. Thirdly, the crisis has led to an unparalleled impact on the openness of international borders, with many questioning the sustainability of open borders and pointing out international flows of people as spreaders of the pandemic. In these extraordinary times, elections become even more unpredictable than usual. Here we argue that there is not just one expected impact of the Coronavirus outbreak on the electoral fate of Donald Trump. Based on classic theories of voting behavior, we expect that some aspect of this crisis might help him, while others might harm him. More specifically, this project tests which aspect related to the global pandemic will impact the vote for Donald Trump and why. The research question motivating our study is important for two reasons. Firstly, the vote drivers for Donald Trump, an atypical candidate in recent American history, are still a matter of controversy in political science (Hooghe and Dassonneville 2018). The significance of the Trump administration for the nature of American values and resilience of liberal democracy are a matter of intense debate, highlighting the importance of this case study. Moreover, Trump’s double status as both a populist outsider and a presidential incumbent make this case particularly interesting. While populist entrepreneurs are expected to benefit from some forms of economic anxiety and disaffection with the political system (De Vries and Hobolt 2020), incumbent candidates are expected to be electorally punished in bad economic times (Duch and Stevenson 2008). Disentangling which of these dynamics is at play is an empirical question to be resolved. Secondly, this research question is also relevant for comparative scholars and beyond the specific interest on Trump’s electoral fortunes. The impact of economic and political crises on populist radical right and anti-immigrant narratives remains surprisingly controversial in previous scholarly literature. While some authors document a relationship between recessions and populist voting (Jackman and Volpert 1996; Hobolt and Tilley 2016), others find that the relationship is actually negative (Knigge 1998; Arzheimer and Carter 2006), insignificant (Lubbers, Gijsberts and Scheepers 2002), or conditional on other systemic factors (Golder 2003; Arzheimer 2009; Dancygier 2010). Similarly, the literature analyzing public support for liberal democracy has reached contradictory conclusions regarding the impact of the economy (Christmann and Torcal 2017). The impact of a major economic downturn is one of the central ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic, and taps into some of the most pressing puzzles in contemporary studies on populism and voting behavior. However, we will also study the impact of other potential channels connecting the pandemic with political outcomes: anxieties about immigration in a global and presumably dangerous world (i.e. narratives about the ‘Chinese virus’ or the virus spreading globally via open borders and international travelling routes), and the political management of the pandemic (with the US having the highest death toll in the world). The role of anti-immigrant reactions is particularly important, as they have been singled out as the main driver of Trump’s victory in 2016 (Hooghe and Dassonneville 2018; Reny et al. 2019). Determining whether economic explanations shape populist voting more or less than cultural anxieties, anti-immigrant attitudes, perceptions of political competence or, simply, partisanship, is an important question for comparative scholars these days. This study will present the results of a survey experiment in the US manipulating the saliency of economic conditions, immigration flows, and the management of the Covid-19 pandemic on vote intention during the 2020 US Presidential campaign.

This project explores forms of support authoritarian political systems enjoy. As part of this study, we will field several original online experiments in Turkey, recruiting Turkish participants from Facebook using online advertisement. Introduction: While an influential scholarship recognizes that nondemocratic regimes depend on popular support to lower the costs of staying in power, relatively little is known about the different forms of support authoritarian political systems enjoy. For example, can autocracies – like democracies – enjoy support that relies on the congruence between the values of citizens and those of the political system, not just on evaluations of policy performance? And, in authoritarian regimes, is support for the political community and regime principles resilient to fluctuations in policy performance, just like it is shown to be in democracies (Norris 2011:57-81)? Answers to these questions have implications for our understanding of authoritarian stability and democratic transitions. For authoritarian stability, they imply that regimes able to build support that does not exclusively rely on assessments of performance, may be less impacted by short-term fluctuations in policy performance, such as economic declines. For democratic transitions, they imply that a change in power may not be enough to challenge people’s congruence with views and principles of the old regime. In this work, we propose to test expectations regarding the various types of support authoritarian political systems may enjoy using empirical evidence from contemporary Turkey. Turkey, an electoral autocracy, has in the last decade gained the characteristics of a personalist authoritarian regime (Caliskan 2018, Esen & Gumuscu 2016, Yilmaz & Bashirov 2018). As part of this study, we will field several original online experiments, recruiting Turkish participants from Facebook using online advertisement. Theoretical background: Based on the work of Easton (1965), we begin by distinguishing between three different objects of the political system: the community, the regime, and the authorities. According to existing research, these objects can be hierarchically ranked from more to less conceptually abstract. Continuing to build on the work of Easton (1965), and for each separate object, we also distinguish between normative and instrumental forms of support. Normative forms of support are based on congruence and agreement between the values of citizens and of the political system, while instrumental forms of support are based on performance evaluations and judgments. In line with standard practice, we will use different survey items to tap into each support type, falling into each of the 6 cells. Building on this discussion, we formulate our main research questions and follow-up hypotheses.

We are conducting a meta-analysis exploring the causal effect of adult civic education interventions on democratic values. The current registration updates the previous registration uploaded to OSF website for this project in March 2021 (https://osf.io/kz6wr).

We examine the role of societal modernization and women’s political empowerment in generating support for women politicians amongst citizens. Using a global analysis of 116 countries with a new dataset of micro- and macro-level longitudinal data, we show that societal modernization and women’s political empowerment only have positive effects on support for women in politics when the other is also present. For citizens who experienced either societal modernization or women’s political empowerment, but not both, we do not see this positive relationship. Crucially, these patterns hold when analysing the current social and political context, as well as the context experienced by citizens during their formative years. We argue that both social and political changes are required to develop supportive attitudes towards women in politics.

This pre-analysis plan registers a study that will be conducted in Turkey as the first setting in a multi-country project exploring the use of online civic education materials for democracy promotion. Our multi-country project aims to explore whether democratic values and behaviour can be induced in diverse political contexts through online civic education. First, we are interested in the kinds of content that are more effective at inducing democratic values and behaviour. Second, we will also assess whether the same content, but with different framing, has different effects on individuals’ democratic orientations. Study participants will be recruited through Facebook and Instagram to take part in our research. Data will be collected via a Qualtrics survey. Online civic education materials will be shown to participants as embedded parts of the survey. The first setting for this multi-country study will take place in Turkey. Participants will be randomly assigned to either one of eight treatment groups or one of two placebo videos. We will test three different content dimensions with our treatments: 1) framing democracy (output, input, rights), 2) tone of message (mixed, loss, gain), and 3) length of intervention (long, short). The placebo group will be exposed to a video focused on space exploration, which will be prepared in both long and short lengths. In addition to their contribution on their own, the results will also inform how we will proceed in the remaining countries. This project contributes to the growing interest in citizens' political attitudes and behaviour around the world, as many countries are experiencing democratic backsliding, arguably driven in part by eroding democratic support, values, knowledge and behaviors among citizens. Our experiments will shed light on whether it is possible to use online educational interventions to encourage support for and understanding of democracy in various political context.