The Struggle for Democracy - Views and Evaluations of Democracy As Elements of Political Competition.

In European countries and many places outside Europe, there is almost universal declarative support for democracy. Actors openly describing themselves as opponents of democracy are marginal among both political parties and citizens. On the other hand, the quality of democracy varies across countries, and processes of democratic backsliding are observed in certain places. The combination of these phenomena means that politicians who implement anti-democratic policies and the voters of such parties also consider themselves democrats. The question arises here: if they are all democrats, do they all mean the same thing when they talk about democracy? In this article, we are interested in citizens’ perspectives. From this point of view, an important question is what supporters of parties responsible for democratic backsliding think about democracy? This raises another question: to what extent do views of democracy fit into the axes of political competition? To what extent do the electorates of different parties agree on the importance of certain features of democracy? This question is fundamental regarding how deep the political dispute is and how political competition is defined. A second issue is whether electorates differ in assessing how democracy works. Here, the question is: to what extent do the evaluations of the same political reality depend on political preferences? Differences in evaluations of democracy may, in turn, influence how the stakes of an election are defined - is it the implementation of specific sectoral policies or the constitutional shape of the state? The paper analyses data from the European Social Survey, mainly from the Understandings and Evaluations of Democracy module carried out in 2012 and 2021/2. The analysis will focus on Hungary and Poland, which are considered as cases of a high degree of democratic backsliding. However, citizens' attitudes from these countries will be analysed from a comparative perspective.