In recent years, political science has devoted substantial attention to democratic backsliding and the erosion of democratic institutions. Much of this research has focused on elite behavior, institutional reforms, and executive strategies that weaken checks and balances and the competitiveness of elections. By contrast, comparatively less attention has been paid to the mass-level foundations of these processes, and to the role citizens may play in enabling, tolerating, or resisting democratic erosion. Only recently have scholars begun to examine how citizens understand democracy, how they evaluate different democratic principles, and how these attitudes may shape responses to democratic decline. Across a wide range of contemporary democracies, there is growing evidence that citizens’ support for democracy is often conditional. Citizens’ reaction to judicial reforms in Hungary and Poland, debates over executive power in the United States, and support for media restrictions in several European countries suggest that democratic backsliding is not only an elite-driven process, but one that may also involve limited public resistance. These patterns raise important questions about how citizens prioritize democratic principles, the conditions for their acceptance of democratic trade-offs, and their willingness to defend democratic institutions and punish illiberal candidates. This panel welcomes papers that examine citizen attitudes toward democracy and their implications for democratic backsliding from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. We especially encourage submissions that: (1) analyze citizens’ support for, or tolerance of, violations of specific democratic principles (e.g. judicial independence, minority rights, majority rule, freedom of expression); (2) explore how different understandings and conceptions of democracy shape citizens’ responses to democratic violations; (3) investigate the conditions under which citizens accept trade-offs between democracy and outcomes such as economic growth, security, or political responsiveness; and (4) examine how polarization, inequality, crises, and party competition shape citizens’ commitment to democratic principles.