Support for executive aggrandizement under weak polarization

Previous studies examining the demand side of democratic backsliding have focussed on partisan motivation as the leading cause of voters' acceptance of executive aggrandizement. A recent study by Grossman et al. [2022. “The Majoritarian Threat to Liberal Democracy.” Journal of Experimental Political Science 9 (1): 36–45] argues that a substantial proportion of voters grant popularly elected politicians considerable latitude and that such a majoritarian understanding of democracy is the driving force behind democratic erosion. This paper compares these two perspectives using an online public opinion survey conducted in Japan, one of the least politically polarized democracies worldwide, comprising both an observational component and a preregistered survey experiment. Analysis of the survey data reveals that respondents were more inclined to support executive power grabs when these were framed as aligning with citizens' views in policy formulation. In addition, we estimated that a substantial subset of respondents was classifiable as “election supremacists,” meaning that they supported such power grabs and regarded them as democratic regardless of the partisanship of the chief executive. This paper contributes to the literature by presenting a new case wherein the public's majoritarian understanding of democracy may pose a threat to democratic politics.