Fantastic! Could you please add me, as well.

We are grateful to the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation for funding this project!

We have received so much useful comments over the years from too many people to be mentioned here, but would like to thank in particular 3 anonymous reviewers, the editor, Francesca R. Jensenius, @matanock.bsky.social, @jordimunoz.bsky.social, and @ascharpf.bsky.social!

✅ Our findings shed light on the dynamics of democratic retrenchment in weak democracies, highlighting that politically marginalized groups might be the ones who most carefully navigate trade-offs between democratic rights and security.

📊 We find that a heavy state-military presence prime makes citizens more reluctant to accept restrictions on democratic right, but only among politically marginalized groups. In the presence of violent non-state threats citizens become more likely to support policies that curtail democratic rights.

To test this, we conducted a 2019 post-election survey with a vignette experiment on 1,080 Indian citizens in two insurgency-affected states.

The display of state coercive force during elections should make citizens more likely to protect democratic rights, but if it occurs in contexts of non-state threats, citizens may become more likely to accept that rights are restricted.

We argue that citizens weigh competing threats when forming opinions on the appropriate limit to state powers.

Many citizens worldwide vote amid armed threats from state and non-state actors. Yet, little is known about how such militarized elections shape citizens’ support for restrictions on democratic rights.

@hannefjelde.bsky.social and me have a new open access article out in @democratization.bsky.social! doi.org/10.1080/1351...

We study how militarized elections shape citizens’ support for democratic rights – and present evidence from a vignette experiment in India 🪖🗳️

Thread follows ⬇️