At a CDDRL research seminar held on October 29, 2026, Benjamin Yoel, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, presented his research exploring the conditions under which international actors speak about democratic developments abroad and how such pressure affects public support for opposition movements resisting democratic backsliding.

He first showed, using an original dataset of remarks by US Secretaries of State, that pro-democracy actors often draw attention to democratic developments abroad and that they can serve as critical signals to both domestic audiences in the US as well as international ones. He then examined the conditions under which those statements could shape public opinion elsewhere.

For the first factor, Yoel hypothesized that endorsements from allied democracies, compared with those from other democracies, would raise approval of pro-democracy movements and the likelihood that people share information about them with people they trust. For the second, he expected praise for a movement to raise approval and sharing more than shaming the incumbent, as praise is harder for incumbents to weaponize, while shaming lets them portray the opposition as serving foreign interests. Lastly, he had competing expectations for the domestic electoral context, expecting the effect of praise over shaming to be stronger either before or after an election.

Yoel tested these hypotheses in Hungary, which has experienced democratic backsliding since 2010 and has drawn extensive reactions from both allied and adversarial states. By using two survey experiments with a single-profile conjoint design, he reached more than 4,300 respondents, including 2,128 surveyed before and after the election. Respondents read a short description of a movement that varied whether a foreign democracy commenting on it was an ally or a non-ally and whether it praised the movement or criticized the government. They then rated their approval of the movement and how likely they were to share information about it with people they trust.

Across both studies, it was evident that content mattered most. As depicted by respondents’ ratings, praising the movement rather than criticizing the government raised approval by about four percentage points. It also raised the likelihood of sharing by about two points in the first study and about one and a half points in the second. In contrast, allyship had weaker effects: allied endorsements raised approval in the second study but not in the first, and they did not consistently increase sharing. Finally, the election also shaped the results: praise affected approval before and after the election, while its effect on sharing, like the advantage of allied endorsements, appeared only before it.

Ultimately, Yoel’s research sheds light on public opinion toward opposition actors in backsliding democracies, highlighting the strategic dilemma that foreign support creates for opposition movements. As democracy promotion from the West recedes, he concluded, leveraging foreign pressure becomes more critical than ever.