Mainstream party adaptation and support for democracy

Mainstream parties adapting to the economic and social changes of the neoliberal era often do so by shifting their policy positions away from their traditional brand identities. This paper argues that policy adaptation without attendant changes in party mobilizational strategies are bad for democracy’s public legitimacy. Using country-year panels of governing and main opposition parties in 114 democracies between 1989 and 2019 and two-way fixed-effects estimators, this paper finds populist and left-wing welfare policy shifts are associated with higher levels of support for democracy only when parties make these issues salient in their party mobilization strategies. Mainstream parties that adopt the same policy shifts without making them salient in campaigns and mobilization preside over regimes with lower levels of support for democracy.