Understanding Democratic Support

From a Comparative View

Yue Hu

Department of Political Science, Tsinghua University

Overview

1. Know what’s Democratic support, and why matters
2. Learn how to compare supports: Challenges and solutions
3. Understand where the variance of democratic support roots
   • A China view

1 Know Democratic support

1.1 What’s democratic support

The way in which a person evaluatively orients himself to some object through either his attitudes or his behavior¹……Some types of evaluations are closely related to what the political authorities do and how they do it. Others are more fundamental in character² because they are directed to basic aspects of the system.
—Easton (1975)

• General
• Aggregated
• Profound

• General: general trait in modern society
• Aggregated: care more about the group not individual
• Profound: deeply related with the characteristics of the society

1. “Specific support” (Easton 1975, 436).

2. “Diffuse support” (Easton 1975, 436).

1.2 Democratic Crisis

Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki (1975)

Przeworski (2019)

JOD Editorial (2024)

1.3 Researchers’ Efforts

The mission for social scientists

Social scientists aim for consistent patterns in human societies.

Common issues
Development, culture, democracy…

+

Rich data

⇓

General patterns
Three puzzles

1.4 Puzzle 1: Support → Institutions

• Explicit support for democracy (Inglehart and Welzel 2005)
  • Support for democracy is the foundation of regime sustainability (Easton 1965; Lipset 1959).
  • “Fading allure” →
    • Support for populist parties (Plattner 2017)
    • Discontent with democratic norms (Foa and Mounk 2016, 2017)
    • A crisis of institutional trust (Wike and Fetterolf 2018).
• Is support for democracy really the “foundation”?
  1. Diffuse support vs specific support (Easton 1975; Norris 2011).
  2. Democratic enlightenment (Acemoglu et al. 2009) vs
     Democratic consolidation (Boix 2011; Przeworski and Limongi 1997).

The Lipset-Easton theory of democratic support provides a comprehensive explanation of the link between public sentiment and regime dynamics.

The concept of the “fading allure of liberal democracy” refers to the increasing disillusionment with democratic norms and institutions worldwide.

Diffuse support vs. specific support: - The former is more crucial for the endurance of democracy.

1.5 Puzzle 2: Support ← Institutions

• Democratic institutions automatically generate demand for themselves, and this demand fosters support (Dalton 2004; Mishler and Rose 2007).
  1. Democratic socialization
  2. Lifelong learning theory
• Thermostatic model (Wlezien 1995; Claassen 2020).
  1. Authoritarian nostalgia → (majority) electoral democracy.
  2. Minority discrimination → (protective) minoritarian democracy.

Authoritarian nostalgia plays a role in shaping attitudes towards democracy.

1.6 Puzzle 3: Data Proliferation vs. Pattern Consensus

Dataset	Years	Countries	Indicators	Features
Polity V	1800-2018	168	Regime type, competition, and participation	Covers both democracy and authoritarianism
Freedom House	1973-2022	210	Political and civil rights	Focuses on individual rights and freedoms, not government institutions or performance
V-Dem	1789-2022	202	50+ macro indicators, 450+ micro indicators	Bayesian IRT, confidence intervals, and open-source data

• Democratic support: WVS, Global Barometers, GSS, Pew, etc.

Dataset	Theoretical Basis	Years	Number of Countries	Score Range	Components	Unique Features	Coding Method
Polity V	Gurr’s (1974) and Eckstein and Gurr’s (1975)	1800-2018	168	0-100	Regime type, political institutions, political competition, and participation	Includes multiple rounds of internal consistency checks; distinct conceptual framework viewing democracy and authoritarianism not as mutually exclusive but as part of a continuum from full authoritarianism to mixed authority (anocracy) to full democracy.	Coded and analyzed by teams of experts in political science and international relations
Freedom House	The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights	1973-2022	210	0-1	Two parts: Political rights (e.g., electoral process, political pluralism and participation, government functioning) and civil rights (e.g., freedom of expression, associational rights, rule of law, personal autonomy, and individual rights)	Assesses individual rights and freedoms rather than the government's performance; data prepared by a team of internal and external analysts and consultants from academic, think tank, and human rights sectors.	128 analysts and approximately 40 advisors (for the 2023 edition)
V-Dem Polyarchy	Dahl’s (1971) theory of democracy, measuring polyarchy as a combination of freedom of association, suffrage, clean elections, elected executive, and freedom of expression	1789-2022	202	-10 to 10	50 macro indicators, 450 micro indicators measuring political participation, executive recruitment, and constraints on executive powers	Uses independent coders for each question; includes a custom-designed Bayesian IRT measurement model for inter-coder reliability tests; provides point estimates and confidence intervals for all expert-coded questions; fully transparent aggregation procedures; all data, including raw coder-level judgments, are freely available, except for personally identifiable information.	Over 3,200 global scholars and experts involved in coding

1.7 Puzzle 3: Data Proliferation vs. Pattern Consensus

1. Democracy → Public Opinion: Stable democratic institutions weaken democratic support (thermostatic effect).
   • Democracy ↑ → Support ↑ (Wuttke, Gavras, and Schoen 2020)
   • Democracy ↑ → Support ↓ (Foa and Mounk 2017)
     • Weakening of electoral and minoritarian institutions.
2. Public Opinion → Democracy: Democratic support correlates positively with the development of democratic institutions
   • Support ↑ → Democracy ↑ (Inglehart and Welzel 2005)
   • Support ↑ → Democracy ⇣ (Fails and Pierce 2010)
     • Strengthens in established democracies and in non-democratic regimes.

Inglehart, Ronald, and Christian Welzel (2005): Countries with greater democratic support tend to become more stable and robust democracies.

Fails, Matthew D., and Heather Nicole Pierce (2010): Insignificant positive with one-year survey, and insig negative with multiple years

Thermostatic effect theory suggests that stable democracies experience declining public support.

1.8 Wrap Up

• Democratic support: Focusing on the diffuse kind
• Democracy in crisis
• Researchers’ effort
  • Enduring theoretical development
  • Enriching data collection
  • ⇒ puzzles patterns

Why?

Data generation process (DGP)

• People were asked about democracy w.o. clear definition
• People were asked with Churchill-style questions

Cognition

• People understand democracy based on different roots

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.”—Churchill

Churchill-style: which force respondents to place themselves on a scale between complete support and full opposition.

2 Learn Democratic support

2.1 Illustration of DGP Issues

• United Kindom, lawmakers leave.
• Swarming Capital defending democracy.
  • January 6, 2021 United States Capitol attack

The challenges of data availability and comparability across countries and time:

• Difficulties in conducting longitudinal research: Existing institutions affect democratic support.
• Difficulties in cross-national comparison: Country-specific factors (e.g., culture, history).
• Difficulties in drawing general conclusions: Data is uneven across countries and time periods.

2.2 The Problem

Different questions
Different people
⇓
Incomparable data

Solution

Latent variable analysis (e.g., IRT)

2.3 A Methodlogical Introduction

What’s a latent variable

Source: socialemotionalworkshop.com

2.4 Item Response Theory (IRT)

Rasch Model (1PL)

Pronounced /resh/

→ Two-Parameter Logistic Model (2PL)
→ Three-Parameter Logistic Model (3PL)
→ Four-Parameter Logistic Model (4PL)

↓

Multidimensional IRT
Ordinal IRT
Group IRT

2.5 Rasch Model

• y_iq∈{0,1}: Response, where i refers to the respondent and q refers to the item
• θ_i∈{-∞, +∞}: Latent trait, representing the respondent’s ability (unbounded)
• σ_q: Difficulty of the item, typically represented as z-scores

🌰 Items with varying difficulty:

• Should the government respond promptly and decisively to major public health threats?
• Is it acceptable for the government to sacrifice the rights of a minority to ensure the public health safety of the majority?

2.6 Formal Expression

\[ \text{1PL: }\color{red}{P(Y_{iq} = 1)} = \color{blue}{logist^{-1}(\theta_i - \sigma_q)}. \]

\[ \color{red}{Item Response} = \color{blue}{Latent Trait Theory}. \]

Two-Parameter Item Response Theory (2PL-IRT)

\[ \text{2PL: } P(Y_{iq} = 1) = logist^{-1}(\color{green}{\kappa_q}\theta_i - \sigma_q). \]

Dynamic Comparative Public Opinion

\[Pr(y_{ktqr} = 1) = logist^{-1}[\frac{\bar{\theta}'_{kt} - {(\beta_{qr} + \color{orange}{\delta_{kq}})}}{\sqrt{\alpha^2_q + (1.7\times \color{red}{\sigma_{kt}})^2}}]\]

Difficulty/discrimination: how well a question can different people from below to above

Dispersion: magnitude of the measurement error

• \(\bar{\theta}\): Mean public opinion
  
• β: Question difficulty
  
• α: Question dispersion
• δ: Country-specific item bias
  
• σ: Polarization in public opinion

Random walk priors for opinion mean and sd

\[\bar{\theta}_{ktqr}\sim N(\bar{\theta}'_{k, \color{green}{t-1}}, \sigma^2_{\bar{\theta}'}),\sigma_{kt}\sim LN(\sigma_{k, \color{green}{t-1}}, \sigma^2_{\sigma})\]

D(dynamic)C(comparative)PO model country specific-item to address equivalence. aggregate level public opinion polarizaiton ordinal scaled answers. The sophisticated measurement models ignite the hope on the studies of relationship between democratic development and public support.

2.7 Newest Development for Understand Democratic Support (Tai, Hu, and Solt 2024)

• Application of the advanced method:

• Largest-scale data: Global public opinion survey database on democratic support (144 countries, 1989–2022).

193 membership in the UN

2.8 Democratic Support in a Comparative View

2.9 So, support → institution

2.10 Institution → support

2.11 Wrap up

What the latest empirics tell

• No evidence for the direct connections between support and institution

What the advanced methodology solves

• People were asked about democracy w.o. clear definition (✓)
• People were asked with Churchill-style questions (✓)

What left

• People understand democracy based on different roots (Do they?)

3 Understand Democratic Support

3.1 Support vs. institutions

• Support vs. institutions (institutional guarantees)

3.2 Support vs. prioritization

• Support vs. prioritization (priorities: economic, justice, or value-oriented)

3.3 A Case Study of China (Hu 2020)

Source: Discourse of democracy in Chinese political language

Theory	Within-Discourse	Cross-Discourse
Universal-Value	Define with democratic values	Connect to democratic values
Justification	Define with regime characteristics	Connect to regime characteristics
Refocusing	Define with public priorities	Connect to democratic values

Method

• Full-discourse scrutiny
• Distant reading

• Democratic values: Freedom, equality, fairness
• Public priorities: Economy, stability, security

3.4 Design

Within-discourse

• Target: Conceptualization
• Strategy:
  Unsupervised + Supervised
• Structural topic modeling
  • 40 topics (data-driven decision)
  • Context adjustment (concept network, time, international environment)

Cross-discourse

• Target: Discourse association
• Strategy: Supervised, explaining key-word counts

Data:

• People’s Daily
• 58 years (1946–2003)
  
• 1,371,607 articles (cross-discourse)
  • Democracy discourse: 11.2%

3.5 “Democracy” in discourse

3.6 Findings

3.7 Latest Development

Whole-process people’s democracy (Xinhua 2024)

[W]hole-process democracy involves more than just a matter of voting, rather, it is forged into every single link in the running of state power. This breaks from a solitary focus on voting and ensures the people’s rights to democratic elections, consultations, decision-making, management, and oversight.

Xi said that to measure whether a country is democratic, a key element is to see whether the rules and procedures for the exercise of power are democratic, and more importantly, whether the exercise of power is genuinely subject to public oversight and checks.

3.8 Wrap up

• Refocusing strategy wins.
• Outcome?

Lu and Chu (2022)

Take-home points

• Understand democratic support → democratization/democratic crisis
• Advanced means to learn and compare democratic support from the level of human society
• Diverse understanding →
  diverse practices
  • “Genuinely subject to public oversight and checks”

Thank you

  sammo3182

  yuehu@tsinghua.edu.cn

  https://www.drhuyue.site

Reference

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Boix, Carles. 2011. “Democracy, Development, and the International System.” American Political Science Review 105 (04): 809–28.

Claassen, Christopher. 2020. “In the Mood for Democracy? Democratic Support as Thermostatic Opinion.” American Political Science Review 114 (1): 36–53. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055419000558.

Crozier, Michel, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki. 1975. The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission. New York University Press.

Dalton, Russell J. 2004. Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices: The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268436.001.0001.

Easton, David. 1965. A Systems Analysis of Political Life. New York: Wiley.

———. 1975. “A Re-Assessment of the Concept of Political Support.” British Journal of Political Science 5 (4): 435–57. https://www.jstor.org/stable/193437.

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Foa, Roberto Stefan, and Yascha Mounk. 2016. “The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect.” Journal of Democracy 27 (3): 5–17.

———. 2017. “The Signs of Deconsolidation.” Journal of Democracy 28 (1): 5–15.

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