DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.25211240.v1
title: REPLICATION MATERIAL to Democratic norm violations during emergency and citizens’ evaluation of democracy. Results from a conjoint experiment in Hungary

description: Without a doubt, the COVID-19 pandemic was one of the modern world’s most serious health crises. Not a single country has remained unaffected; countries were struck hard by the virus or the pandemic's overarching social and economic consequences. Governing through the pandemic proved particularly challenging. The dilemma of political leaders was the difficult task of pursuing public health goals while not compromising on democratic norms (Engler et al., 2021; Zwitter, 2012). Commonly, governments declared a state of emergency, a juncture where normal constitutional procedures were deferred to ensure citizens' safety and protection: the executive branch of the government was vested with the power to make decisions that are normally outside of its jurisdiction, and even suspend basic rights. While the temporary concentration of political power aimed to enable the executive to act quickly, the curtailment of civil rights such as the freedom of movement and assembly sought to slow the spread of the virus (Engler et al., 2021).<br>In general, while democracies do not significantly deviate from democratic norms during emergencies, autocracies observe more civil rights violations (Hafner-Burton et al., 2011; Neumayer, 2013). Many scholars point out that the COVID-19 pandemic offered an opportunity for the executive arm of government to consolidate and extend its powers through emergency rule (Aktürk & Lika, 2022; Buštíková & Baboš, 2020; Guasti, 2020; Guasti & Bustikova, 2022; Marinov & Popova, 2022). Major democratic violations were observed in backsliding democracies (e.g. example Hungary, Poland), as well as authoritarian countries (e.g. China, Russia, Egypt, and Venezuela) (Guasti, 2020; Guasti & Bustikova, 2022; Katsanidou et al., 2022). Emergency measures in these countries were, notwithstanding, neither necessary nor proportionate (Edgell et al., 2021). Even so, because people tend to tolerate authoritarian leaders when their safety is threatened (Blombäck, 2020), citizens responded obediently (Thomson & Ip, 2020; but see Kriesi & Oana, 2023), hinting at a possible trade-off between the violations of democratic norms and certain government outputs.<br>Curiously, while emergency measures have direct effects on people’s everyday lives, there are only a few contemporary attempts to operationalize and measure public attitudes towards emergency politics in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic (Ganderson et al., 2023). More specifically, our knowledge is sparse regarding how much and under what circumstances people tolerate the challenging of democratic norms in an emergency. In our paper, we focus on<i> the interplay between emergency measures violating democratic norms and government performance in navigating the crisis and their combined effect on citizens’ evaluations of democracy.</i> In other words, we seek to reveal if citizens are willing to accept democratic norm violations if these violations result in favorable outcomes such as a decreasing number of deaths or a growing economy and, as a result, think that these transgressions are compatible with democracy. In the language of input-throughout-output legitimacy, our study investigates whether people lean towards output legitimacy in an emergency as opposed to appreciating the quality [participation, transparency, inclusiveness, openness] of the decision-making process (i.e. input and throughput legitimacy) (Scharpf, 1999; Schmidt, 2013). In the study, we categorize the most common mitigation measures according to whether they challenge vertical, horizontal or diagonal accountability. Measures such as (1) postponing the elections and excessively relying on expert advice hurt vertical accountability (or input legitimacy), while (2) the suppression of parliamentary powers (legislative, scrutinizing, and deciding on the termination of the emergency) challenges horizontal accountability (or throughput legitimacy). Furthermore, (3) the temporary suspension of civil rights (such as the freedoms of movement, assembly, and expression) contribute to the degradation of diagonal accountability.<br>Our study is unique in that, 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, contrary 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.<br>Hungary is a curious case for our empirical exercise. During the emergency, 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 the state of the economy (Batory, 2022; Guasti, 2020).<br>We find that the effectiveness of emergency measures and economic performance stands 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.