Subverting democracy in the name of democracy

Attempts to subvert democracy are often justified, paradoxically, as an effort to save or improve democracy. Yet, little is known about the effectiveness of these justifications. Here, we conduct two original vignette experiments, where US American and Polish respondents are introduced to a proposal of executive aggrandizement, usurping control over election results and capturing the media, respectively. We manipulate the proposal's party and the justification they provide in a 2 × 3 between participants experiment (total N = 5,008). Our experiments replicate well-known effects of partisan bias in support for the subversion of democracy: respondents in both the US and Poland are more tolerant of subversion when it is initiated by their in-party. However, respondents are surprisingly resistant to justifications, especially in the high external validity design implemented in the US. Even in Poland where we “forced” respondents to pay attention to the justifications, support for subversion is increased only among in-partisans and not by much. These results raise doubt that democratic subversion can be effectively masked as a pro-democracy intervention by pro-democratic rhetoric.