DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.25211240.v2
title: REPLICATION MATERIAL to Democratic norm violations during emergency and citizens’ evaluation of democracy. Results from a conjoint experiment in Hungary (Papp & Nkansah 2025, East European Politics)

description: The COVID-19 pandemic posed one of the most serious public health and governance challenges in recent history. Governments across regime types adopted extraordinary measures to contain the virus, often invoking states of emergency that temporarily concentrated executive power and suspended ordinary democratic procedures. These measures - ranging from postponing elections and bypassing parliaments to restricting civil liberties - triggered widespread debate about their compatibility with democratic governance (Engler et al., 2021; Zwitter, 2012). While such emergency responses may have been justified by the need for swift action, they often entailed clear violations of democratic norms, raising the question: <i>how do citizens evaluate democracy when procedural standards are compromised in the name of effective crisis management?</i>This study examines how citizens perceive the quality of democracy under emergency conditions, with a particular focus on the independent and combined effects of democratic norm violations and government performance outcomes during a public health crisis. We investigate whether citizens are willing to tolerate infringements on democratic norms—such as constraints on civil liberties or reductions in parliamentary oversight—and whether this tolerance is shaped independently by the nature of the violations, the outcomes achieved (e.g., declining death rates or economic recovery), or the interaction between the two. This inquiry contributes to broader theoretical debates on the conditionality of democratic support and the potential trade-offs between procedural legitimacy (input and throughput) and output legitimacy (Scharpf, 1999; Schmidt, 2013).Our study is unique because, first, unlike other studies in the field, we include a <i>wider selection of emergency measures</i> in our empirical exercise specific to the COVID-19 pandemic. This enables us to compare the effects of various democratic norm violations on people’s evaluations of democracy within the same context. Second, while respective studies zoom in on the violations of civil liberties specifically (Bol et al., 2021; Graeber et al., 2023) and government performance in mitigating the crisis (Poma & Pistoresi, 2023; Roccato et al., 2021), the scholarship pays less attention to how curbing vertical and horizontal accountability challenges citizens’ democratic evaluations, much less to their relative impact. Besides including violations of civil rights in our study, we extend our investigation to measures challenging the people’s ability to hold the government accountable (vertical accountability) and checks and balances to executive power (horizontal accountability). Third, in contrast to previous studies in the field that utilize observational data, we employ a <i>conjoint experiment</i>, which allows us to make, on the one hand, stronger causal statements, and on the other hand, directly compare emergency measures as to how much they reconcile with people’s perceptions of democracy.To explore our research question, we implemented a conjoint experiment with a representative sample of 1,000 adults in Hungary, a paradigmatic case of democratic backsliding. During the emergency, the Hungarian Parliament passed the so-called Authorization Act, which enabled the government to rule by decree with no pre-set time limit. Many scholars argued that the Orbán-government’s mitigation measures were neither necessary nor proportionate (Guasti, 2020; Guasti & Bustikova, 2022; Szente & Gárdos-Orosz, 2022; Thomson & Ip, 2020), and contributed to further authoritarianization (Thomson & Ip, 2020). At the same time, despite the draconian measures, Hungary performed poorly both in terms of public health and economic outcomes. Hungary offers a compelling case for such an investigation. As an "illiberal" democracy with an established pattern of executive overreach (Bogaards, 2018; Buzogány & Varga, 2018; Körösényi et al., 2020; Pap, 2017), it represents a least likely case for critical citizen responses to democratic violations. If citizens in such a context still distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate emergency measures — or reconsider them based on outcomes —this would suggest important boundary conditions for democratic resilience. This study contributes to the literature on democratic backsliding by investigating how emergency powers, often used to justify procedural transgressions, are evaluated by citizens in a regime already exhibiting signs of institutional erosion. In such contexts, understanding how citizens evaluate democratic norm violations is key to assessing the resilience or fragility of public democratic commitments.Importantly, we distinguish between two analytical logics in this study. First, we estimate the main effects of democratic norm violations and performance indicators on perceived democratic quality. These reflect baseline citizen expectations about what constitutes a democratic system under crisis conditions. Second, we investigate whether performance outcomes condition these evaluations — that is, whether citizens are more accepting of norm violations when outcomes improve. Although the conjoint task does not ask respondents to make explicit value trade-offs, it allows us to infer conditional tolerance from shifts in the perceived democratic quality of profiles that combine norm violations with favourable outcomes. We, therefore, frame trade-offs not as deliberate citizen choices, but as contextual shifts in democratic attribution under varying performance conditions. Our approach contributes to emerging scholarship on emergency politics by offering a nuanced understanding of public evaluations of democracy during crises.We find that the effectiveness of emergency measures and economic performance stand out as the two most important indicators of democratic quality for respondents, suggesting a seeming prioritization of tangible outcomes over procedural considerations during a crisis. The results of our trade-off analysis reveal, notwithstanding, that while the preference for output legitimacy over input and throughput legitimacy is possible, such decisions by citizens may be temporal and selective, and dependent on the severity of the crisis for which a state of emergency is declared.<b>Data provider</b>: NRC Marketingkutató és Tanácsadó Kft.<b>Questionnaire programming</b>: Zsófia Papp<b>Replication code</b>: Zsófia Papp<b>Software</b>: Stata 16<br>