Improving Precision in Democracy Survey Measures

• In Event: Advances in Measures of Political Attitudes (Virtual Session)

Abstract

Voters’ commitment to democracy has come to the forefront of both academic study and media scrutiny around the world. Frequently, surveys ask respondents how satisfied they are with the way democracy is working in their country, or how democratic their country is. However, these questions fall short of the methodological standard of clear question wording, or that questions should be written in such a way that both the researcher and the respondent have the same understanding of what is being talked about (Groves et al 2009). When a question uses terms that do not mean the same thing to the researcher and the respondent, the likelihood that the researcher and the respondent interpret the question differently increases, which then leads to improper research conclusions, as is currently happening among survey researchers who are asking about democracy. Using text-analysis methods of 2,000 open-ended responses about democracy from a representative U.S.-based sample, this paper shows that respondents do not think of democracy in a uniform fashion, despite many questions being examined as such. Instead, this paper highlights the breadth in which people think about democracy and how that translates to other related survey measures, as well as offers tested suggestions for improving survey measures related to democracy.

Author

• Alejandra Aldridge, Brigham Young University