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Democracy, Public Support, and Measurement Uncertainty
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Democracy, Public Support, and Measurement Uncertainty

Yuehong 'Cassandra' Tai, YUE HU and FREDERICK Solt
SocArXiv
Center for Open Science
05/05/2022
DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/y5fdv
url
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055422000429View
Published (Version of record)This article has now been published in a journal and has been peer-reviewed by subject experts. This version may differ significantly from the preprint version. Access restricted to faculty, staff and students
url
https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/y5fdvView
Preprint (Author's original)This preprint has not been evaluated by subject experts through peer review. Preprints may undergo extensive changes and/or become peer-reviewed journal articles. Open Access

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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.
 Political Science and International Relations Sociology and Political Science

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