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Annual Review of Political Science

Volume 28, 2025

Defining and Measuring Democratic Norms

  • Gretchen Helmke1 and Josiah Rath1
  • Department of Political Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 28:233-251 (Volume publication date June 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on April 09, 2025
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

If scholars and pundits are right, the erosion of norms in the United States and abroad poses a significant danger to democracy. Understanding what exactly norms are, what makes them democratic, and how best to measure them is thus essential for generating and evaluating explanations of how such norms weaken and collapse. Our article addresses each of these key elements. On the conceptual front, we argue for more precision in defining norms and more consideration in labeling them as democratic. On the measurement front, we develop a general utility function and use it to evaluate the various methodological strategies that researchers have deployed to causally identify democratic norms. In between, we synthesize the fast-growing literature on norms and democratic backsliding using a fourfold typology, with transgressors and enforcers on one dimension and political elites and citizens on the other. We conclude by pinpointing several new areas for future research.

Keyword(s): democratic backsliding, democratic norms, misperceptions, norm enforcement, post-democratic norms, social norms
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Defining and Measuring Democratic Norms
Annual Review of Political Science 28, 233 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-041322-040610
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