Popular Support for Democratic Backsliding: Performance Legitimacy and Selective Accountability in El Salvador
The global wave of democratic backsliding has prompted debate over whether regime support during democratic erosion is driven by economic performance or by leader-level institutional manipulation. Both sides of this debate operationalize “delivery” primarily in economic terms, leaving open the question of whether other metrics of state performance maintain citizen tolerance for democratic erosion. This paper addresses that gap by examining the micro-level mechanisms of incumbent support in El Salvador under President Nayib Bukele, where security delivery, rather than economic performance, has become the primary basis of regime legitimacy. Using individual-level data from the 2021 LAPOP AmericasBarometer (\(N = 1{,}435\)), I estimate logistic regression models that disaggregate victimization by source to test whether citizens apply different accountability logics to different domains of state performance. I find that victims of gang extortion are significantly less likely to support Bukele (\(\beta = -0.476, p < 0.05\)), treating continued insecurity as a specific policy failure rather than an accelerator for authoritarian demand. Victims of state bribery show no significant decrease in support, suggesting the incumbent is largely insulated from the reputational costs of institutional abuse. Economic perception operates as a strong independent predictor of support but does not formally moderate the victimization-support relationship, indicating that security accountability and economic satisfaction function as parallel rather than interactive mechanisms. These findings challenge both the “iron fist” thesis, that victimization drives demand for authoritarianism, and the assumption that performance legitimacy is a solely economic phenomenon. Instead, they reveal a pattern of selective accountability in which citizens narrow the scope of evaluation to the single domain that motivated the incumbent’s rise, effectively giving the state leeway in all others.