Who (Really) Supports Democracy (and How Can We Measure It)? Experimental Evidence from Revealed Preference Measures

Milan Svolik
Professor of Political Science
Yale University

In this talk, Svolik will present a large-scale, multi-country assessment of the predictors of citizen-level commitment to democracy and  the most frequently employed survey measures of support for democracy. He and co-authors adopt a revealed-preference approach that infers citizens’ commitment to democracy from their choices of candidates in experimentally manipulated election scenarios. In this framework, a citizen “supports democracy” not when she says so, but when her candidate choices in scenarios that mimic real-world elections reveal a willingness to prioritize democratic principles over other competing considerations, such as partisanship or policy preferences. Their findings are robust to a range of statistical techniques, including conventional and machine learning approaches for detecting treatment effect heterogeneity, hold across a number of countries with diverse levels and histories of democracy, and predict voting for real-world parties and candidates with authoritarian tendencies.

Presented by Kellogg's Democratization Research Cluster.

Milan Svolik is professor of political science at Yale University. His research and teaching focus on comparative politics, political economy, and formal political theory. Svolik has authored and co-authored articles on the politics of authoritarian regimes, democratization, and democratic backsliding.