Sorting Out Support for Democracy: A Q‐Method Study

Abstract

Support for democracy is crucial to democratic stability. Yet the nature and range of democratic belief systems, and whether these belief systems are idiosyncratic to specific individuals and polities or are more general, remain largely unknown. Such unknowns complicate an already daunting measurement task. Extant surveybased measures are fraught with validity problems and say little about the democratic beliefs individuals most strongly hold or reject. To address these problems, this study blends focus groups, interviews, and Q-sort methodology to examine patterns of subjective, behavioral renderings of democratic support profiles. It finds seven shared profiles of beliefs concerning democracy, alternative regimes, and political and civil freedoms across Chile and Argentina. Their resemblance to democratic belief systems found with other methods bolsters their validity and generalizability. The analyses reveal the relative weight of each orientation within each belief profile and their intensity across profiles. In so doing, they identify which items are crucial for withinand across-case comparisons. Altogether, these insights should inform survey-based approaches to detecting and describing the democratic support profiles latent in the polity.

Don’t Good Democracies Need “Good” Citizens? Citizen Dispositions and the Study of Democratic Quality

“…They combine both cognitive and affective orientations, which citizens use to understand and judge the political world. A sizeable body of empirical research has emerged in recent years on how citizens understand democracy (Bratton, Mattes, & Gyimah-Boadi, 2005, Chapter 3;Canache, 2012;Carrión, 2008;Dalton, Sin, & Jou, 2007;Fuchs & Roller, 2006;Kornberg & Clarke, 1994;Miller, Hesli, & Reisinger, 1997;Silveira & Heinrich, 2017;Thomassen, 1995), but the literature on the more specific question of which democratic values and principles citizens actually endorse is still fairly limited (Carlin, 2017;Carlin & Singer, 2011;Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 2002;Kriesi, Saris, & Moncagatta, 2016;Lalljee, Evans, Sarawgi, & Voltmer, 2013;McClosky, 1964;Schedler & Sarsfield, 2007).…”

The Normative and Material Foundations of Judicial Confidence in Bolivia

“…Bolivia's case allows for the examination of the early evolution of institutional support as a deeply political phenomenon, as opposed to cases in which the overall confidence in the institution has already been established. Thus, this study contributes to recent efforts to identify the various sources of institutional support in young political regimes (Carlin 2017;Carlin and Singer 2011). It shows that inequalities in the economic and political structure cause people to trust institutions for contrasting reasons.…”

Understanding the Kurdish conflict through the perspectives of the Kurdish-Turkish diaspora in Germany.

“…It is also important to highlight that the participants did not describe a certain meaning of democracy and the implementation of human rights in this frame. The meanings of democracy and implementation of human rights might be different for different groups (Carlin, 2018), so we do not know what these democratic solutions entail for these participants in general.…”