Political Participation Under Uncertain Norms

Thiemo Fetzer, Lukas Hensel, Christopher Roth and Hannah Zillessen
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Thiemo Fetzer: University of Warwick & University of Bonn & CAGE & LSE & CEPR
Lukas Hensel: Guanghua School of Management, Peking University
Christopher Roth: University of Cologne
Hannah Zillessen: KU Leuven

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: Democracies can sustain disagreement over outcomes, but they are harder to sustain when citizens also perceive the governing norms of political contestation as settled along partisan lines. We study this problem in the context of Brexit and experimentally vary truthful information about how much Leave and Remain supporters agree with, and how uncertain they are about, the appropriateness of a second referendum. We find that uncertainty matters more than agreement: respondents become more willing to donate to and tweet for campaigns on either side of the referendum question when they learn that others, especially members of their own political camp, are more uncertain about the norm. The pattern is strongest for support for the norm position that is less popular within one's own political camp, while private beliefs about the norm and about Brexit itself barely move. These findings are more consistent with reduced conformity pressure and higher perceived returns to political expression than with private-belief updating, and they suggest that information about uncertainty can generate a meaningful form of depolarization in democratic engagement even when underlying outcome preferences remain largely unchanged.

Keywords: Uncertainty; Norms; Social Image; Political Participation JEL Classification: D81; D83 P11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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