Reactions to US liberal democratic decay

Abstract

The United States, a long-established liberal democracy, is undergoing rapid and far-reaching liberal retrenchment. The liberal pillar of US democracy -- the defense of civil liberties and minority rights -- is crumbling. How do citizens around the world react to this retrenchment? We answer this question via two causal research strategies. First, we leverage a natural experiment using individual-level data (N=32,080) from thirty-five countries to causally identify how exposure to attacks on women's rights undermine the US' standing in the world among the citizens of core US allies. Second, we rely on a pre-registered vignette experiment in Britain (N=2,993) to show that exposure to news reporting about undermining civil liberties and minority rights, depresses the world's view of the US as a democracy. Our experimental results also demonstrate that liberal retrenchment, particularly attacks on \textit{minority rights}, has downstream consequences: it undermines public willingness to engage in collaboration with the US. These findings underscore the global ramifications of liberal retrenchment in the US, revealing how liberal backsliding in a dominant democratic power can reshape respect around the world, undermine the perceived legitimacy of its democratic credentials and depress public support for collaboration. Attacks on liberal values and minority rights not only has costs for those subjected to these attacks, it costs the US as a whole.

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ORCID for Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte: orcid.org/0000-0002-9330-3945

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