Journal article
Democracy, Public Support, and Measurement Uncertainty
The American political science review, Vol.118(1), pp.512-518
02/2024
DOI: 10.1017/S0003055422000429
Abstract
Do democratic regimes depend on public support to avoid backsliding? Does public support, in turn, respond thermostatically to changes in democracy? Two prominent recent studies (Claassen 2020a; 2020b) reinvigorated the classic hypothesis on the positive relationship between public support for democracy and regime survival—and challenged its reciprocal counterpart—by using a latent variable approach to measure mass democratic support from cross-national survey data. However, both studies used only the point estimates of democratic support. We show that incorporating the concomitant measurement uncertainty into these analyses reveals that there is no support for either study’s conclusion. Efforts to minimize the uncertainty by incorporating additional survey data still fail to yield evidence in support of either hypothesis. These results underscore the need for both more nuanced analyses of the relationships between public support and democracy and taking measurement uncertainty into account when working with latent variables.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Democracy, Public Support, and Measurement Uncertainty
- Creators
- Yuehong 'Cassandra' TaiYUE HU - Tsinghua UniversityFREDERICK Solt - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- The American political science review, Vol.118(1), pp.512-518
- DOI
- 10.1017/S0003055422000429
- ISSN
- 0003-0554
- eISSN
- 1537-5943
- Language
- English
- Electronic publication date
- 05/05/2022
- Date published
- 02/2024
- Academic Unit
- Political Science
- Record Identifier
- 9984274645502771
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