Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-f97m6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-20T13:24:58.375Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Individual Life Horizon Influences Attitudes Toward Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2019

MARIE LECHLER  and
UWE SUNDE Open the ORCID record for UWE SUNDE [Opens in a new window]
MARIE LECHLER*
Affiliation:
University of Munich
UWE SUNDE*
Affiliation:
University of Munich and the Centre for Economic Policy Research
*
*Marie Lechler, PhD Student, University of Munich, marie.lechler@econ.lmu.de.
†Uwe Sunde, Professor of Economics, University of Munich and Centre for Economic Policy Research, London, uwe.sunde@lmu.de.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Support for democracy in the population is considered critical for the emergence and stability of democracy. Macro-determinants and retrospective experiences have been shown to affect the support for democracy at the individual level. We investigate whether and how the individual life horizon, in terms of the prospective length of life and age, affects individual attitudes toward democracy. Combining information from period life tables with individual survey response data spanning more than 260,000 observations from 93 countries over the period 1994–2014, we find evidence that the expected remaining years of life influence the attitudes toward a democratic political regime. The statistical identification decomposes the influence of age from the influence of the expected proximity to death. The evidence shows that support for democracy increases with age but declines with expected proximity to death, implying that increasing longevity might help fostering the support for democracy. Increasing age while keeping the remaining years of life fixed as well as increasing remaining years of life for a given age group both contribute to the support for democracy.

Information

Type
Letter
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 113 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 860 - 867
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

Financial support by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through CRC TRR 190 is gratefully acknowledged. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/F9RCKB.

References

REFERENCES

Acemoglu, Daron, Johnson, Simon, and Robinson, James A.. 2001. “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation.” The American Economic Review 91 (5): 1369–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Acemoglu, Daron, and Robinson, James A.. 2006. The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Almond, Gabriel, and Verba, Sidney. 1963. The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes in Five Western Democracies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burke, Brian L., Kosloff, Spee, and Landau, Mark J.. 2013. “Death Goes to the Polls: A Meta-Analysis of Mortality Salience Effects on Political Attitudes.” Political Psychology 34 (2): 183–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cincotta, Richard P., and Doces, John. 2012. “The Age-Structural Maturity Thesis.” In Political Demography: How Population Changes Are Reshaping International Security and National Politics, eds. Goldstone, Jack A., Kaufmann, Eric P., and Toft, Monica D., chap. 7. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.Google Scholar
Di Palma, Giuseppe. 1990. To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Diamond, Larry. 1999. Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Doty, Richard M., Peterson, Bret E., and Winter, David G.. 1991. “Threat and Authoritarianism in the United States, 1978–1987.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61 (4): 629–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dyson, Tim. 2012. “On Demographic and Democratic Transitions.” Population and Development Review 38: 83–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Echebarria-Echabe, Agustin, and Fernandez-Guede, Emilia. 2006. “Effects of Terrorism on Attitudes and Ideological Orientation.” European Journal of Social Psychology 36 (2): 259–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Falk, Armin, Becker, Anne, Dohmen, Thomas, Enke, Benjamin, Huffman, David, and Sunde, Uwe. 2018. “Global Evidence on Economic Preferences.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133 (4): 1645–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fehr, Ernst, and Hoff, Karla. 2011. “Introduction: Tastes, Castes, and Culture: The Influence of Society on Preferences.” Economic Journal 121: F396–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foa, Roberto Stefan, and Mounk, Yascha. 2016. “The Democratic Disconnect.” Journal of Democracy 27 (3): 5–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foa, Roberto Stefan, and Mounk, Yascha. 2017. “The Signs of Deconsolidation.” Journal of Democracy 28 (1): 5–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fuchs-Schündeln, Nicola, and Schündeln, Matthias. 2015. “On the Endogeneity of Political Preferences: Evidence from Individual Experience with Democracy.” Science 347 (6226): 1145–8.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldstone, Jack A., Kaufmann, Eric P., and Toft, Monica Duffy, eds. 2012. Political Demography: How Population Changes Are Reshaping International Security and National Politics. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.Google Scholar
Inglehart, Ronald. 2003. “How Solid Is Mass Support for Democracy—And How Can We Measure It?” Political Science & Politics 36 (1): 51–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Inglehart, Ronald, and Welzel, Christian. 2003. “Political Culture and Democracy: Analyzing Crosslevel Linkages.” Comparative Politics 36 (1): 61–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Inglehart, Ronald, and Welzel, Christian. 2010. “Changing Mass Priorities: The Link between Modernization and Democracy.” Perspectives on Politics 8 (2): 551–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kontis, Vasilis, Bennet, James E., Mathers, Colin D., Li, Guangquan, Foreman, Kyle, and Ezzati, Majid. 2017. “Future Life Expectancy in 35 Industrialised Countries: Projections with a Bayesian Model Ensemble.” Lancet 389 (10076): 1323–35.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lee, Ronald, and Mason, Andrew. 2011. Population Aging and the Generational Economy: A Global Perspective. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linz, Juan J., and Stepan, Alfred. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1959. “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy.” American Political Science Review 53 (3): 69–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1960. Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. New York: Doubleday Garden City.Google Scholar
Magalhaes, Pedro C. 2014. “Government Effectiveness and Support for Democracy.” European Journal of Political Research 53 (1): 77–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Persson, Torsten, and Tabellini, Guido. 2009. “Democratic Capital: The Nexus of Political and Economic Change.” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 1 (2): 88–126.Google Scholar
Sales, Stephen M. 1973. “Threat as a Factor in Authoritarianism: An Analysis of Archival Data.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 28 (1): 44–57.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sanderson, Warren C., and Sherbov, Sergei. 2005. “Average Remaining Lifetimes Can Increase as Human Populations Age.” Nature 435 (7043): 811–13.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sanderson, Warren C., and Sherbov, Sergei. 2013. “The Characteristics Approach to the Measurement of Population Aging.” Population and Development Review 39 (4): 673–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sears, David O., and Funk, Carolyn L.. 1999. “Evidence of the Long-Term Persistence of Adults’ Political Predispositions.” The Journal of Politics 61 (1): 1–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
United Nations. 2015. World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision. New York, NY: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division.Google Scholar
Urdal, Henrik. 2006. “A Clash of Generations? Youth Bulges and Political Violence.” International Studies Quarterly 50 (3): 607–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weber, Hannes. 2013. “Demography and Democracy: The Impact of Youth Cohort Size on Democratic Stability in the World.” Democratization 20 (2): 335–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Ben, and Dyson, Tim. 2016. “Democracy and the Demographic Transition.” Democratization 24 (4): 594–612.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Xu, Jiaquan, Murphy, Sherry L., Kochanek, Kenneth D., and Arias, Elizabeth. 2016. “Mortality in the United States 2015.” NCHS Data Brief, 267.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Lechle and Sunde Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/F9RCKB
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Lechler and Sunde supplementary material

Lechler and Sunde supplementary material 1

Download Lechler and Sunde supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 4.4 MB
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.