Knowing the Rules of the Game: How Civic Knowledge Shields Democracy from National Narcissism

Democracies around the world are under strain, and psychologists have been racing to identify the attitudes that make citizens vulnerable to anti-democratic appeals. A new study from Poland adds a striking twist to that effort: not all political knowledge protects democracy in the same way. According to research published in Current Psychology by Piotr Michalski, Marta Marchlewska, and Adam Karakula of the Institute of Psychology at the Polish Academy of Sciences, understanding the basic rules of the democratic game—how institutions work, what separation of powers means, why elections must be free and fair—acts as a psychological buffer against national narcissism and the anti-democratic sentiments that flow from it. Simply following the news, by contrast, tells a far more ambivalent story.

The research team distinguished between two facets of political knowledge that are often lumped together in surveys and civic education curricula. The first, which they call knowledge about the rules of the game, captures a citizen’s grasp of democratic principles and institutional structures: the functions of parliaments, courts, and constitutions, and the norms that keep political power in check. The second, current political knowledge, reflects awareness of ongoing political events and actors—who holds office, what happened in the news over the past few weeks, which parties are in coalition. Both are forms of political sophistication, but the study suggests they play very different roles in shaping how citizens relate to their nation and to democracy itself.

To test these ideas, the researchers ran two large cross-sectional surveys in Poland, a country that has become a natural laboratory for studying democratic attitudes after years of intense political polarization. The first study included 705 participants; the second expanded the sample to 1,622. The team used structural equation modeling, a statistical framework that allows researchers to estimate relationships between latent psychological constructs—such as national narcissism or support for democracy—while accounting for measurement error in the survey items. The data behind the analyses are openly available on the Open Science Framework, and the studies received ethics approval from the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, with all participants providing informed consent.

The pattern that emerged was consistent across both studies. People with stronger knowledge of democratic rules and institutions reported higher support for democracy, lower endorsement of dictatorship, and lower belief in conspiracy theories. Crucially, these associations were explained by lower levels of national narcissism—a defensive belief that one’s nation is exceptional and uniquely great, yet insufficiently recognized and appreciated by the world. National narcissism has been linked in prior research to hypersensitivity to criticism, hostility toward outgroups, and willingness to undermine democratic norms, so anything that weakens it may help protect democratic commitment. Structural political knowledge, the findings suggest, does exactly that.

The second study added an important layer by measuring how citizens evaluated the democratic quality of their own country. Here a serial pathway appeared: greater knowledge of the rules of the game was associated with lower national narcissism, which in turn predicted more positive evaluations of the country’s democracy, and those evaluations were linked to stronger pro-democratic orientations—greater support for democracy, weaker endorsement of dictatorship, and fewer conspiracy beliefs. In other words, knowing how democracy is supposed to work appears to calm the defensive, grievance-driven form of national pride, allowing citizens to judge their political system on its merits rather than through the lens of wounded national esteem.

Current political knowledge, however, refused to fit neatly into this protective story. Awareness of recent political events and actors showed a double-edged pattern. On one hand, it was associated with anti-democratic sentiments through higher national narcissism; on the other, it displayed protective associations through stronger national identification—the secure, non-defensive sense of belonging to one’s nation. The authors also uncovered a subtle statistical dynamic: the two knowledge dimensions acted as mutual suppressors in their relationships with national narcissism. Both were negatively related to narcissism at the simple bivariate level, but when entered jointly into the model, the sign of the coefficient for current political knowledge reversed, while the negative coefficient for rules-of-the-game knowledge grew stronger. Because suppression is statistically equivalent to an indirect effect, the team tested it both ways, and both indirect pathways were significant—for example, current political knowledge’s effect on narcissism via rules of the game was estimated at −0.54 with a 95 percent confidence interval of [−0.91, −0.29] in the first study, with a closely matching pattern of −0.45 [−0.60, −0.33] in the second.

What might explain this divergence between the two kinds of knowledge? One plausible reading is that following the news exposes citizens to conflict, threat, and narratives of national grievance—content that can feed the defensive pride at the heart of national narcissism—while also strengthening ordinary, secure attachment to one’s country. Knowledge of democratic principles, by contrast, provides a normative yardstick. Citizens who understand what checks and balances are for, and why independent courts and free elections matter, may be less impressed by claims that the nation’s greatness justifies bending the rules. The findings echo earlier cross-national work suggesting that to know democracy is to love it, and they align with research showing that civic education can mitigate some anti-democratic consequences of partisan polarization.

The methodological care behind the study deserves note. Despite a high correlation between the two knowledge dimensions, the researchers showed that collinearity was not a problem: the variance inflation factor for the two latent predictors was 2.91 in the first study and 2.29 in the second, both well below the conventional cutoff of 5. They also ran models with covariates and found the same overall pattern of results, and they verified discriminant validity between constructs using modern criteria for structural equation modeling. The questionnaires included additional constructs collected for separate projects, and full item sets and detailed results are available in the supplementary materials, reflecting the transparency norms that increasingly define psychological science.

Poland’s recent history gives the results particular weight. The country experienced a period of contested institutional change, mass protest movements, and heated debates over the rule of law, making it a setting where questions about democratic commitment are not abstract. National narcissism has been repeatedly implicated in Polish political life, predicting support for restrictive policies, conspiracy thinking, and receptiveness to populist rhetoric. The new findings suggest that one counterweight may be hiding in plain sight: a citizenry that genuinely understands the architecture of its own democracy. Notably, the research was funded by the Polish National Science Center, and the authors report no conflicts of interest.

The broader implication is a challenge to how societies think about civic competence. Decades of survey research have measured political knowledge largely as recall of facts—who the ministers are, what a bill says—yet this study indicates that the knowledge that matters most for defending democracy may be structural rather than topical. News consumption, for all its civic value, is not a substitute for understanding constitutional principles, and may even coexist with defensive nationalism. As democracies confront rising authoritarian sentiment and conspiracy beliefs, the study points toward civic education that teaches the rules of the game—not merely the scoreline—as a quietly powerful inoculation against the politics of wounded national pride.

Subject of Research: The role of different types of political knowledge in buffering national narcissism and anti-democratic sentiment

Article Title: Knowing the rules of the game: political knowledge as a buffer against national narcissism and anti-democratic sentiment

Article References: Michalski, P., Marchlewska, M., & Karakula, A. (2026). Knowing the rules of the game: political knowledge as a buffer against national narcissism and anti-democratic sentiment. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1612. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10115-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10115-7

Keywords: political knowledge, national narcissism, democracy, conspiracy beliefs, political psychology, civic education, support for democracy, national identification, structural equation modeling, Poland, dictatorship endorsement, social psychology