Mass Understandings of Democracy: Experimental Evidence from a 6-Country Survey

• In Event: Attitudes and Beliefs about Democracy and Autocracy

Abstract

Most citizens across democracies and nondemocracies claim that they support democracy, but what do they mean by that when they make such claims? The answer hinges on how they define “democracy” in the first place. While political scientists have offered multiple definitions, less is known about how the masses themselves understand democracy—despite the public’s role in safeguarding democracy in democracies and driving democratization in nondemocracies. Drawing on existing research, we formulate predictions of how various attributes of political regimes (e.g., electoral and executive constraints, civil liberties and social equity, populist and technocratic policymaking) shape public perceptions of democracy. We then design a well-powered conjoint experiment that taps into these attributes and examine how the masses understand democracy in six countries: Egypt, Japan, India, Italy, Thailand, and the U.S. Combining the parallel conjoint experiment with open-ended responses, we show the extent to which ordinary citizens hold a strictly procedural view of democracy, as well as how this procedural understanding is colored by other conceptions of democracy. Our findings have implications for why self-proclaimed democrats often tolerate scholarly-classified undemocratic behavior in the real world.

Authors

• Jonathan Art Chu, National University of Singapore

• Scott Williamson, Oxford University

• Eddy Yeung, University of Oxford