Silencing the critics? Exploring public support for political censorship of critical actors

This project investigates the extent to which citizens tolerate different levels of political hostility (Dodeigne, 2025) – ranging from insults to legal actions to threats – against five critical actors: journalists, scientists, artists, judges and local politicians. We investigate individual-level sources of variation by looking at the role of partisanship (Berntzen et al., 2026; Kubin et al., 2025; Nai et al., 2025; Wunsch et al., 2025), ideology, ideological extremism and populist and pluralist attitudes (Akkerman et al., 2014; Berntzen et al., 2026; Bos et al., 2021), and media use (Bilewicz & Soral, 2020). We additionally look at the contextual level, investigating the extent to which attacks on specific actors are more likely to be endorsed, and exploring whether the context of an election normalizes support for attacks or whether the campaign context instead educates voters on the value of freedom of expression. We do this using panel survey data collected around the Dutch national elections of 2025 (n wave 1 = 2,756).