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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ka Ming ChanORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© The Author(s) 2025. Experts consider some parties to be democratic and others undemocratic, based on criteria related to political pluralism. But we know little about how citizens perceive a party’s commitment to democratic norms and whether these perceptions are vulnerable to change. Building upon the motivated reasoning literature, we answer these questions with data from a nationally representative sample in Canada – a well-regarded liberal democracy. First, our descriptive findings show that voters uniformly engage in motivated responding, perceiving their in-party as more committed to democratic norms than the out-party(-ies). Second, leveraging the 2022 Canadian trucker convoy, we prime respondents about the mainstream parties’ undemocratic behaviours (according to scholarly standards). Our experiment demonstrates asymmetrical information updating that supports motivated reasoning: voters maintain their in-party perceptions but they update perceptions of out-parties to be more undemocratic if they hold strong opinions about the convoy. We discuss how these findings enrich the democratic recession literature.
Author(s): Chan KM, Stephenson LB
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Political Studies
Year: 2025
Pages: Epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 15/03/2025
Acceptance date: 12/02/2025
Date deposited: 08/04/2025
ISSN (print): 0032-3217
ISSN (electronic): 1467-9248
Publisher: SAGE Publications Inc.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217251324025
DOI: 10.1177/00323217251324025
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