Democratic backsliding increasingly proceeds through gradual normative erosion rather than sudden institutional collapse. While existing research examines whether citizens hold politicians accountable for antidemocratic behavior, far less attention has been paid to whether elite delegitimizing rhetoric shapes citizens' own behavioral dispositions toward civic norms --- understood as respect for collective order and obeying laws.

This paper investigates how exposure to electoral delegitimization rhetoric by partisan elites affects citizens' adherence to civic obligations, filling a critical gap in the literature on democratic erosion and norm compliance.
We depart from prior work in two fundamental respects. First, we focus on a discursive mechanism in which elites claim to defend democracy by contesting the legitimacy of electoral processes themselves---a move that precedes the policy-democracy trade-offs examined in existing scholarship. Second, rather than studying how citizens evaluate politicians' antidemocratic behavior, we ask whether elite rhetoric generates downstream behavioral spillovers, reshaping how citizens understand their own obligations to state-enforced norms.

We theorize two distinct pathways depending on political alignment. For citizens aligned with the delegitimizing elite, exposure to such rhetoric is expected to erode the perceived procedural legitimacy of the state, reducing compliance with civic norms such as tax obligations and traffic laws, and increasing tolerance for norm violations by others. For citizens opposed to the delegitimizing elite, effects may run in competing directions: either toward reaffirmation of democratic commitments in response to perceived institutional threat, or toward generalized institutional distrust and selective norm defection along ideological lines.

To test these hypotheses, we conduct a preregistered survey experiment in Spain (N = 2,400), a context in which leading opposition figures---including the leaders of the Partido Popular and VOX---have sustained a public campaign questioning the legitimacy of the incumbent government and of recent electoral processes. Participants are randomly assigned to receive real statements by these elites or a placebo condition. Dependent variables capture both personal norm defection, including cheating behavior during the survey and stated intentions of tax evasion, and norm defection tolerance, including acceptance of tax avoidance by others and harassment of political figures. Perceived electoral fairness and institutional legitimacy is measured as an intermediary variable to assess the proposed mechanism.

This study contributes to research on elite cues, civic norm compliance, and democratic erosion by providing causal evidence on a pathway through which elite discourse translates into mass normative change, with implications well beyond the electoral arena.