The Heinz I. Eulau Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best article published in the APSA journal American Political Science Review
Citation from the Award Committee:
“Rationalizing Democracy: The Perceptual Bias and (Un)Democratic Behavior” grapples with a central issue for contemporary democracies: when do citizens accept undemocratic behavior? In this article, Suthan Krishnarajan advances the debate by showing how citizens change their views on what actions are regarded as democratic and undemocratic to dovetail with their political beliefs. While previous studies have shown that citizens accept undemocratic behavior when they stand to gain politically from it, Krishnarajan goes beyond this finding to help us understand how citizens rethink what democracy is when it comes into conflict with their partisan preferences. The paper bridges literatures from political psychology and comparative politics, by applying insights from the former to explain important phenomena pertaining to anti-democratic behavior and, presumably in extension, democratic stability and change.
The empirical evidence is fabulous: the article combines an original survey experiment with carefully crafted vignettes around democratic and undemocratic behavior on salient issues with a cross-national survey that covers 22 countries. The results generalize astonishingly well across diverse country settings, while also leaving open important research questions about who updates their views of democracy and the extent to which the share of citizens willing to revise their views of democracy differs across country contexts. On top of this, the article is very well written and the presentation of the argument and results is clear throughout and easily accessible, even to a non-specialized readership. The article illustrates the best of political science—what seems like a simple theory with the power to explain a wide range of behavior on a key topic of today.
Suthan Krishnarajan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University, where he studies political regime instability in democracies and autocracies. His current research agenda seeks to understand, explain, and influence ordinary citizens’ willingness to accept undemocratic politicians in Western democracies. His dissertation received the Aarhus University Research Foundation PhD Award, and he has published articles in leading academic journals such as the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, and Science Advances. From September 2024 until 2028, he will lead a large research project, Advertising Democracy, that examines whether democratic advertisements—ads that communicate the importance of democratic principles in an easily accessible manner—can improve citizens’ democratic commitments.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Tara Grillos (Chair) of Purdue University, Dr. Carl Henrik Knutsen of the University of Oslo, and Dr. Alisha Holland of Harvard University.