Democratic Norms Ongoing

This project reconceptualizes democratic norms as social norms: citizens hold perceptions of what most others actually do (descriptive norms) and what they ought to do (injunctive norms) in democratic life. Using large-scale original surveys across 14 countries and a range of experimental designs, my team and I find that citizens perceive strong democratic consensus in the abstract — but this consensus weakens substantially when it comes to specific rights and institutional norms.

Traditional democracy research treats citizens' support as individual attitudes or abstract values, but overlooks the social dimension: how perceptions and misperceptions of collective democratic consensus shape individual behavior. Correcting these misperceptions turns out to have real behavioral consequences — including reducing support for democratic transgressions and increasing tolerance for political protest.

Approach

• Conceptual framework: Theorized democratic norms as social norms and identified mechanisms of normative influence.
• Cross-national measurement: Nationally representative surveys in 14 democracies to gauge perceived descriptive and injunctive norms.
• Measurement experiments: Applied a novel social desirability bias method to validate stability of norm perceptions versus personal attitudes.
• Vignette experiments: Embedded manipulated norm messages to test causal effects on democratic support, protest tolerance, and hate-crime justification.

Key Findings

1. Abstract consensus: Citizens perceive strong democratic consensus in the abstract, which weakens significantly for specific rights and institutional norms.
2. Norm misperception gap: People overestimate descriptive support for democracy.
3. Robustness to bias: Perceptions of others' normative beliefs remain stable under social desirability controls.
4. Normative influence: Descriptive norm messages can increase tolerance for protest and reduce justification for hate crimes.
5. Intervention outcomes: Citizens' support for undemocratic acts is higher when scenarios are concrete and realistic than when framed abstractly — but also more responsive to normative interventions.

Working Papers

• Bischof, D., et al. (2024). "How Citizens Perceive Others: The Role of Social Norms for Democracies."
• Bischof, D., et al. (Forthcoming). "Social Desirability Bias In Online Surveys: An Experimental Assessment." Journal of Politics.
• Bischof, D., et al. (2023). "(Mis-)Perceiving Support for Democracy."
• Bischof, D., et al. (2025). "Democratic Transgressions Embedded in Reality."
• Bischof, D., Le Corre Juratic, M., & Wagner, M. (Forthcoming). "Democratic Hypocrisy: Unequal Tolerance for Protest in Germany." Political Science Research & Methods.
• Bischof, D., et al. "Norms over Preferences: How Social Expectations and Partisan Cues Shape Online Deliberation."
• Bischof, D., et al. "Citizens' Narrow Views of Democracy: Insights from Open-Ended Survey Responses."

Funding

• Carlsberg Foundation Young Researcher Fellowship (2022–2025): €595,358
• AUFF Starting Grant 2021 (2022–2025): €380,000