Democracy requires more than institutions. It requires citizens who feel they have something to lose if those institutions fail. Existing research on democratic support has focused on the corrosive effects of affective polarization, where hostility toward political opponents erodes tolerance for democratic norms. This paper argues the more pervasive threat runs in the opposite direction: citizens who are genuinely indifferent to political competition show weaker democratic support than even those who strongly oppose one side.
I develop the competitive arena framework to explain this pattern. Citizens value democracy not merely for its outputs but because it organizes political competition that personally matters to them. Those psychologically anchored to the political landscape, through positive identification with a political camp, opposition to another, or both, have a direct stake in democratic institutions as the arena through which that competition unfolds. The politically unanchored, attached to neither side, have no such stake. For them, democratic competition is personally irrelevant, and democracy becomes an abstraction rather than an arrangement worth defending.
In multiparty Western European systems, I argue this anchoring operates primarily at the level of the left-right bloc rather than the individual party. Using bidirectional IRT graded response models, I recover latent bloc attachment scores for citizens in Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden and derive a four-category typology — fully anchored, positively anchored, negatively anchored, and unanchored citizens. Across all four countries and a demanding set of controls, unanchored citizens exhibit substantially lower democratic support than all other groups, while fully anchored citizens show the strongest commitment.
These findings reorient debates about democratic fragility: if political indifference rather than partisan hostility constitutes the most democratically vulnerable profile, sustaining democratic support requires not simply reducing polarization but giving citizens a meaningful personal stake in political competition.
