Are Canadians Stealth Democrats? An American Idea Comes North

Citizens’ preferences for liberal democracy and its deformations: evidence from Germany

“…Together with the negative coefficient for a lack of external efficacy, this finding suggests that support for postdemocracy is an expression of passivism and contentment with the status quowhich is very much in line with what post-democracy represents (Crouch, 2004). It also mirrors findings from several studies on a stealth-democratic attitude (Bengtsson and Mattila, 2009;Webb, 2013;Coffé and Michels, 2014;Atkinson et al, 2016;Stoker and Hay, 2017).…”

“…A likely reason for this is that technocracy incorporates the idea of complexity in politics through emphasizing the importance of expertise (Fernández-Martínez and Font, 2018: 9). There is mixed evidence, however, on whether citizens with a technocratic attitude are more politically interested (Bertsou and Pastorella, 2017;Bertsou and Caramani, 2020) whereas stealth democracy, which also entails support for detached expert decision-makers as one element, seem to be more prevalent among the less politically interested and formally less educated citizens (Bengtsson and Mattila, 2009;Atkinson et al, 2016;Stoker and Hay, 2017;Webb, 2013; see also Rapeli and von Schoultz, 2021). Given the overlap between stealth democracy and a technocratic attitude, distinguishing between a technocratic and post-democratic conception might serve to shed further light on whether observed associations with education and political interest are due to the role of experts in decision-making or, instead, mainly due to the detached role of decision-makers.…”

Same Problems, Different Solutions: Stealth Democracy and the Vote for a Populist Party

“…For stealth democracy, we use the three original indicators that were introduced by Hibbing and Theiss‐Morse (2002, 138), which aim to capture the preferences of the citizens for different types of decision making. Other studies have also used these indicators to capture stealth democratic attitudes (Bengtsson & Mattila 2009; Webb 2013; Coffé & Michels 2014; Font et al 2015; Atkinson et al 2016). The first indicator is as follows: ‘Things would be better in Finland if successful corporate managers made the decisions’.…”

“…Previous research has expanded the study of stealth democratic attitudes in different countries such as Finland (Bengtsson & Mattila 2009; Rapeli 2016), the United Kingdom (Webb 2013), Canada (Atkinson et al 2016), the Netherlands (Coffé & Michels 2014), and Spain (Font et al 2015), and also explored the association between holding stealth attitudes and supporting different types of democracy (Bengtsson & Mattila 2009) or different types of representation (Font et al 2015; Rapeli 2016). However, although highly correlated – empirically and theoretically – so far, there has been less attention for how stealth attitudes are related to dissatisfaction with democratic representation, and to the vote choice.…”

Conceptualizing and Measuring Citizens’ Preferences for Democracy: Taking Stock of Three Decades of Research in a Fragmented Field

“…Among contributions that examine one conception of democracy alone, it is commonly either citizens’ preferences for direct or participatory democracy (Anderson & Goodyear-Grant, 2010; Bowler et al, 2007, 2017; Dalton et al, 2001; Donovan & Karp, 2006), preferences for stealth democracy (e.g., Ackermann et al, 2019; Atkinson et al, 2016; Lavezzolo & Ramiro, 2018) or populist attitudes (e.g., Fatke, 2019; Schulz et al, 2018; Spruyt et al, 2016). When two conceptions of democracy are treated together, we find various contrasting groupings.…”