Domestic demand for human rights: free speech and the freedom-security trade-off

Why do citizens support violations of their own rights? We know a good deal about why governments sometimes restrict access to information and political participation through censorship, repression, or forced disappearances. But we know little about why citizens sometimes support these government encroachments on their own freedoms. We test one conventional explanation for this phenomenon - that individuals trade freedom for security - by conducting a survey experiment that examines public support for limits on freedom of speech. Our results suggest that external threats do, in fact, increase the willingness of citizens to accept curtailments of their right to free speech. They provide strong evidence that citizens respond to risk with an increased desire for security, even when that security comes at the expense of their individual freedoms. This finding suggests a research agenda examining the interactions between governance and threat perception, including how states manipulate demand for human rights in practice, how citizens evaluate threats to security in the context of conflicting information, and how fluctuating demand for rights influences the dissent-repression nexus.