Critical parties: how parties evaluate the performance of democracies

While the ‘critical citizens’ literature shows that publics often evaluate democracies negatively, we know much less about ‘critical parties’, especially mainstream ones. This paper develops a model to explain empirical variation in parties’ evaluations of democratic institutions, based on two mechanisms: first, that parties’ regime access affects their regime support which, second, is moderated by over‐time habituation to democracy. Using expert surveys of all electorally significant parties in 24 European countries in 2008 and 2013, the results show that parties evaluate institutions positively when they have regular access to a regime regardless of their ideology and a regime’s duration. Moreover, regime duration affects stances indirectly by providing democracies with a buffer against incumbent’s electoral defeat in the immediate past elections. Our findings point to heightened possibilities for parties to negatively evaluate democracies given the increased volatility in party systems in Europe