Conceptualising and Measuring Democratic Values

The goal of this project is to explore how a different way of conceptualising and measuring democratic values (abstractly, through trade-offs, and in negative self-interest scenarios) can lead to a more nuanced understanding of this variable as both a DV and an IV.

Using data from LAPOP, I test how three different conceptualisations of Democratic Values correlate with other variables of interest, such as demographics, political participation, and social and institutional trust.

The first conceptualisation refers to Democratic Values in the abstract, measured by the degree to which people agree that democracy is the best form of government.

The second conceptualisation refers to Democratic Values under trade-off; the goal is to see if people would uphold a democratic system even under hard contextual conditions, such as an economic or security crisis.

Finally, the third conceptualisation builds on the second. It presents democratic values when doing so would directly affect their interests, where the goal is to see if people uphold democratic values even when this would mean giving representation to groups they dislike.

Leveraging the LAPOP data set I found that there is a strong disconnect between abstract measures of democratic values and the other two types of measures. This shows that abstract measures likely capture a performative or weak support for democracy, what Inglehart and Welzel called “questionnaire democrats”