Democracy-Assessment in Cross-National Surveys: A Critical Examination of How People Evaluate Their Regime

Ariely, Gal

doi:10.1007/s11205-014-0666-y

Cited by 31 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Other scholars have observed similar variations as in Fig. 1 for other survey questions measuring self-assessments of democracy where citizens in illiberal regimes like Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Russia or Vietnam either believe their country to be democratically governed to a substantial degree (Ariely 2014) or report widespread support for democracy (Welzel and Klingemann 2008;Welzel and Kirsch 2017).…”

Section: Anchoring the "D-word" In A Cross-cultural Settingsupporting

confidence: 69%

Democracy in context: using a distributional semantic model to study differences in the usage of democracy across languages and countries

2020

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Cross-cultural survey research rests upon the assumption that if survey features are kept constant, data will remain comparable across languages, cultures and countries. Yet translating concepts across languages, cultures and political contexts is complicated by linguistic, cultural, normative or institutional discrepancies. Such discrepancies are particularly relevant for complex political concepts such as democracy, where the literature on political support has revealed significant cross-cultural differences in people’s attitudes toward democracy. Recognizing that language, culture and other socio-political variables affect survey results has often been equated with giving up on comparative research and many survey researchers have consequently chosen to simply ignore the issue of comparability and measurement equivalence across languages, cultures and countries. This paper contributes to the debate, using a distributional semantic lexicon, which is a statistical model measuring co-occurrence statistics in large text data. The method is motivated by structuralist meaning theory, stating that words with similar meanings tend to occur in similar contexts, and that contexts shape and define the meanings of words. Compared to other methodological approaches aimed at identifying and measuring cross-cultural discrepancies, this approach enables us to systematically analyze how the concept of democracy is used in its natural habitat. Collecting geo-tagged language data from news and social online source documents this paper descriptively explores varieties in meanings of democracy across a substantial number of languages and countries, and maps ways in which democracy is used among online populations and regions worldwide.

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Section: Anchoring the "D-word" In A Cross-cultural Settingsupporting

confidence: 69%

Democracy in context: using a distributional semantic model to study differences in the usage of democracy across languages and countries

2020

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“…45 A related problem emerges in cross-national studies examining the determinants of variables based on "social" or "economic," 46 "populist" or "social," 47 "instrumental" or "authoritarian" 48 conceptions of democracy: careful analysis suggests that, with the exception of survey questions about liberal or procedural notions of democracy, it is not clear that other survey items about notions of democracy show the appropriate dimensionality and allow cross-national comparability. 49 In this study, we are primarily interested in investigating the extent to which individuals are committed to a liberal democratic notion of what democracy is. As such, we construct our dependent variable in two steps.…”

Section: The Dependent Variablementioning

confidence: 99%

Do the Rich and the Poor Have Different Conceptions of Democracy? Socioeconomic Status, Inequality, and the Political Status Quo

Ceka¹,

Magalhães²

2020

comp polit

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In this study, we investigate how socioeconomic status is related to people's commitment to liberal democracy. Based on sociological and psychological theories of social conflict and dominance, we argue that those who enjoy a more privileged position in the social hierarchy tend to develop stronger preferences for the existing social and political order. Conversely, people in underprivileged positions tend to be less supportive of that order. Hence, we expect the relationship between socioeconomic status and commitment to liberal democracy to be context-specific: positive in liberal democracies but negative in autocracies. Furthermore, we argue that income inequality amplifies these dynamics, widening the gap between low and high status individuals. We test our hypotheses using the fifth wave of the World Value Surveys.

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“…Ironically, those who consider themselves to be avid supporters of democracy show support for authoritarian rule, while those who live in authoritarian regimes view their countries to be more democratic than those who in democratic ones. These puzzling findings make it absolutely necessary to re-examine what democracy inherently means to ordinary citizens (Shi, 2014: 220; see also Ariely, 2015; Ariely and Davidob, 2011; Bratton, 2010; Carnaghan, 2011; King et al ., 2004). This is because support for democracy matters little if there is no clear understanding of what it means (Welzel, 2013: 310).…”

Section: Puzzles Of Mass Support For Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

How Global Citizenries Think about Democracy: An Evaluation and Synthesis of Recent Public Opinion Research

Shin¹,

Kim²

2018

Japanese Journal of Political Science

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Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, individual scholars and research institutes have conducted numerous public opinion surveys to monitor how global citizenries react to the process of democratization taking place in their own countries and elsewhere. This article reviews the various issues surrounding the divergent conceptions of democracy among political scientists and ordinary citizens, and synthesizes significant findings of the conceptual and empirical research based on these surveys. It also raises a set of new questions that future surveys should address to broaden and deepen our knowledge about citizen conceptions of democracy.

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Democracy-Assessment in Cross-National Surveys: A Critical Examination of How People Evaluate Their Regime

Cited by 31 publications

References 25 publications

Democracy in context: using a distributional semantic model to study differences in the usage of democracy across languages and countries

Democracy in context: using a distributional semantic model to study differences in the usage of democracy across languages and countries

Do the Rich and the Poor Have Different Conceptions of Democracy? Socioeconomic Status, Inequality, and the Political Status Quo

How Global Citizenries Think about Democracy: An Evaluation and Synthesis of Recent Public Opinion Research

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