Before we begin, we would like to thank Seth Hill for his careful read of our work. His criticisms are largely on the mark. They reflect both the limitations of our data and our imagination. In an ideal study, we would have captured elite discourse surrounding questions of democracy, carefully theorized, and tested how such discourse was reflected in public understandings of democracy. We suspect, as Hill observes, that public understandings shift in accordance with elite cues, similar to the process outlined by John Zaller (1992) in The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Indeed, we would take this criticism a step further. Elite understandings of democracy shift as elites perceive strategic advantages in advancing procedural or substantive understandings of democracy, and public understandings of democracy follow suit.
Public understandings of democracy, we argue, are not set in stone either in terms of the specific understandings that emerge from a given set of data or the level of public support for any given definition. The democratic ground shifts beneath the public’s feet. Were we able to accurately reflect democracy’s meanings over time, we expect shifts in meaning would be dynamic and thermostatic (Christopher Claasen, “In the Mood for Democracy? Democratic Support at Thermostatic Opinion,” American Political Science Review, 114, 2020). These shifts would not constitute backsliding, at least as the term is generally used, but would instead reflect ongoing conflict over democracy’s meanings.
For many Americans, our democratic political system is running a deficit when it comes to providing procedural and substantive goods. Some of these Americans believe that our democracy has gone too far in its efforts to assure economic and political equality, thus violating their more limited procedural definition of democracy. Others believe that democracy has not gone far enough and that the political system has failed to live up to its promise of economic prosperity. There is no single set of substantive or procedural outcomes that would leave subscribers to these very different definitions of democracy equally satisfied.
One of our contributions is that we show that one’s understanding of democracy does not neatly align with partisan or ideological identification. Yes, there is sorting, but there are a nontrivial number of self-identified conservatives and Republicans who believe democracy has overpromised and underdelivered when it comes to material goods. In this respect, our findings fit well with recent research by Andrew Little and Annie Meng (“Subjective and Objective Measures of Democratic Backsliding,” 2023) who find that democratic backsliding mostly reflects subjective evaluations rather than objective indicators. We take this a step further: democratic backsliding reflects the inherent tension between procedural and substantive understandings and the thermostatic swings between a more limited procedural democracy and a more expansive substantive democracy.
If there is one place where Hill misreads our work, it is here: we do not accept the evidence of democratic backsliding but instead forcefully argue against it. Democratic backsliding assumes a single elite definition of democracy that the public does not share. Dissatisfaction with democracy, what others have characterized as democratic backsliding, is rooted in a belief that the American political system is not democratic enough and has not lived up to the promise of economic prosperity, the protection of political and procedural rights, or majority rule.
