Support for Democracy: Attitudinal versus Revealed-Preference Measures

We assess the performance of the most frequently employed survey measures of support for democracy. We contrast such conventional, attitudinal measures to revealed-preference measures. The latter are based on voting for candidates in experimentally manipulated scenarios that mimic real-world electoral trade-offs between democratic principles and competing political considerations, such as partisan loyalty or policy preferences. Only a subset of attitudinal measures are both monotonic and discriminating in experimentally revealed commitment to democracy and provide a broad coverage, three baseline criteria that we develop to assess their performance. Two popular measures of support for democracy exhibit either no or a reverse relationship to experimentally revealed commitment to democracy, resulting in potentially misleading findings. These conclusions are robust to a range of statistical techniques, including conventional and machine learning approaches for detecting treatment effect heterogeneity, and hold across more than twenty countries with diverse levels and histories of democracy. We propose a number of recommendations for practice, including improved formulations of established measures of support for democracy as well as set of alternative measures.