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Democracy, Public Support, and Measurement Uncertainty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2022

YUEHONG ‘CASSANDRA’ TAI Open the ORCID record for YUEHONG ‘CASSANDRA’ TAI [Opens in a new window] ,
YUE HU Open the ORCID record for YUE HU [Opens in a new window]  and
FREDERICK SOLT Open the ORCID record for FREDERICK SOLT [Opens in a new window]
YUEHONG ‘CASSANDRA’ TAI*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa, United States
YUE HU*
Affiliation:
Tsinghua University, China
FREDERICK SOLT*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa, United States
*
Yuehong ‘Cassandra’ Tai, PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Iowa, United States, yuehong-tai@uiowa.edu.
Yue Hu, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Tsinghua University, China, yuehu@tsinghua.edu.cn.
Frederick Solt, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Iowa, United States, frederick-solt@uiowa.edu.
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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.

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Type
Letter
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American Political Science Review , Volume 118 , Issue 1 , February 2024 , pp. 512 - 518
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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