What Do Humans Think About Democracy?

• In Event: Democracy

Abstract

Comparative politics has long been interested in average citizens. Using data collected by international survey projects, researchers for decades have examined differences in opinions across countries or changes in political values over time. The basic building blocks of this research have been representative national samples of citizens, often embedded in cross-national research designs.

We question the utility of this approach for understanding politics in a globalized world. In an era when policy challenges cross borders with ease and geographic boundaries have become less powerful markers of differences across people, the nation-state may no longer be the relevant unit of analysis to understand how people think about fundamental political issues. Do humans – rather than Americans, Germans, or Kenyans – actually like democracy and related ideas like equality and freedom?

While the question sounds simple, existing research designs are not equipped to answer it with any precision because of uneven sampling of countries around the world. We therefore turn the conventional model of comparative survey research on its head: starting with the world as the unit of analysis and humans as the relevant population, we develop a new way of analyzing cross-national surveys to gauge public opinion on a global scale. We use data from the World Values Surveys (WVS) to measure and describe human preferences for fundamental ideas like democracy, freedom, and equality

Authors

• Christopher J. Anderson

• Damien Bol, King's College London

• Aurelia Nugroho, King's College London