In Defense of Liberal Democracy: Exploring Motivations for Protesting against Democratic Backsliding

Abstract

When incumbent east central European ethnopopulist politicians attack liberal democratic institutions, how does the experience of living through Communism motivate people to protest in defense of liberal democracy? I argue that a critical subset of people in the generation who lived through Communism is extremely active in protests in defense of liberal democratic institutions. A memory of living with authoritarianism and struggling to establish democracy seems to motivate the older generation to actively safeguard these institutions by generating fear of a return to the past. I expect the older generation to be particularly active at protests in defense of democracy when incumbent ethnopopulists engage in democratic backsliding. I explicitly test these hypotheses by analyzing 82 interviews I conducted with people who protested in defense of liberal democratic institutions in nine different Polish towns and cities in 2019, 2021, and 2022. I couple these interviews with data from an original online protester survey and from the European Social Survey.