Advanced democracies are backsliding. Can we count on the public to save them? Democratic principles may be widely shared, but that does not mean citizens respond as we might hope. Christopher Claassen finds that publics around the world react against advances in liberal democracy by becoming less favorable toward democracy but become more supportive of democracy when it declines. Sara Wallace Goodman finds that citizens in the U.S. and Europe share strong notions of democratic citizenship but only people on some partisan sides respond to threats from polarization and foreign interference. Cross-national research on the scope and dynamics of public support for democracy can help us understand and connect our dilemmas at home and abroad.
Guests: Christopher Claassen, University of Glasgow; Sara Wallace Goodman, University of California, Irvine
Studies: “In the Mood for Democracy?” and “Citizenship in Hard Times”
Transcript
Matt Grossmann:
How does the public respond to threats to democracy? This week on The Science of Politics. From the Scannon Center, I’m Matt Grossmann. Some advanced democracies, including the United States, are facing democratic backsliding. How should we expect citizens to respond? Are publics a source of democratic resilience or a testament to our inability to put country before partisanship? Democratic principles may be more widely shared than we think, but that doesn’t mean citizens respond as we might hope. Americans can learn from cross-national research on the scope and dynamics of public support for democracy. This week, I talked to Christopher Claassen of the University of Glasgow about his American Political Science Review article, In the Mood for Democracy. He finds that publics around the world react against advances in liberal democracy by becoming less favorable toward democracy, but they become more supportive of democracy when it’s in decline. Like other policy areas, support for democracy responds thermostatically. I also talked to Sara Wallace Goodman of the University of California, Irvine, about her new Cambridge book, Citizenship in Hard Times. She finds that citizens in the US and Europe do share strong notions of democratic citizenship, but only people on some partisan sides respond to threats from polarization and foreign interference. It’s usually those outside of power who become most motivated to strengthen citizenship. Claassen finds that democratic political culture is not always self-reinforcing.
Christopher Claassen:
This article, I think, challenges a couple assumptions in the scientific understanding of a link between democracy, on the one hand, and public attitudes to democracy. The first assumption was that to know democracy is to love it. And this has been something that is borne out from research going back to the early 1990s, when people started getting really interested in public attitudes to democracy. And the idea was that once you’ve installed a democratic system, people start to appreciate the fruits of democracy, representative government, equal access to the law, and so on. And then the next generation will become socialized in the democratic norms. So these two forces would create a democratic political culture. And given enough time, the entire society would pro-democratic, given the early life socialization and then the later life experiences. So the assumption was that democracies produce democrats. You just have to survive the first 20 years or so. And ideally, you’ll end up with a consolidated democracy. But in fact, I’m showing with this mood measure that citizens can turn against democracy, and they can turn against democracy even in established democracies, which is something that was thought perhaps unlikely.
The second assumption that, I think, is challenged is that attitudes to democracy are cultural. And this is something that goes back a long way in the study of politics, really to Montesquieu and the middle ages, talking about the various cultures of democracy and so on. And there used to be an idea that, in certain parts of the world, people’s attitudes to democracy was something that was slowly moving. It didn’t really change, if at all, and there were places that had a democratic culture and places that didn’t, and that’s how it was. So the big difference was between [inaudible 00:03:31]. And in fact, what I found is that, yes, indeed, places that have had democracy for a long time tend to have more democratic opinions amongst their citizens, particularly Scandinavia. So Scandinavians are very pro-democracy, but actually, in a lot of parts of the world, it changes rapidly. Within a decade, people can go from being somewhat against democracy to being very pro-democracy or the reverse. So actually, this idea that democracy is a culture, I think, or support for democracy is a culture, is something that there’s not a great deal of support for. And in fact, public support for democracy seems a lot more like other forms of public opinion in that it can ebb and flow. It can rise and fall.
Matt Grossmann:
Wallace Goodman finds that citizens do largely agree on democratic ideals, but don’t always stay united when they’re under threat.
Sara Wallace Goodman:
There are three big findings and takeaways. I would categorize the first being that we have different conceptions of citizenship. So individuals in a democracy hold different views about what it means to be a good citizen. Democracies allow for that kind of diversity and those differences, but the key is that we have meaningful overlaps. So the first thing that the book does is identify what these meaningful overlaps are. So commitments to liberal democratic values, commitments to certain behaviors, like voting, for example, these are things… Or being informed, these are things that most citizens recognize as ideals of good citizenship. So we can have different views on other aspects of good citizenship, but there is a center that binds us together. There’s a consensus of agreement and values. So that’s the first, that we have this meaningful overlap in what it means to be a good citizen.
The second big finding is that differences start to become more important in hard times. So this meaningful overlap becomes attenuated when presented with democratic threat. So we have disagreements when faced with a threat on what it means to be a good citizen. So some people think that being a good citizen means rallying behind national identity. Some people think being a good citizen means being more vigilant against the government. And these differences emerge in response to democratic threat. And why that’s really important, my book shows, is that these differences happen by partisanship, that our stakes in response to democratic threats are shaped by our political identities.
And then I would say that the last important takeaway is that this is not just limited to the United States, that we see in other liberal democracies… So the book looks at the US, it looks at Germany, and it looks at the United Kingdom. We see similar patterns. I mean, there’s variation in terms of the size of effects, but we see that citizens find these political identities meaningful in hard times. And overall, that’s a big problem for democracy because it requires drawing on our civic identity, which is meant to supersede our partisan identity, because if we default to our partisan identity in hard times, it means that we are trying to do what’s best for our party and not what’s best for our country.
Matt Grossmann:
They both take comparative views. Claassen combined survey data from around the world on democratic support, which is hard to do.
Christopher Claassen:
The data are really unruly, but they’re tantalizing because we have a… They go back, in some cases, to 1988, and they cover 150 countries or more, so there’s this wonderful range across town and space. And I knew that if I could come up with a way of integrating them in a way that was comparable, there would be some wonderful insights to be had. So there were three problems we had to overcome. There’s different questions used by different survey projects, and very different questions. Some of them will ask, “Do you approve of military rule, or what do you think about having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament and elections? Or what do you think about a democratic system?” Sometimes it asks people to compare. Would they prefer a democracy or an authoritarian regime, or does it not really matter to them? So there’s a wide variety of questions. And as we know, you can’t compare those directly. The answers will be very different, even if they are tapping something at the root, which is similar.
The second problem was there were big gaps in time, and this is especially acute if you’re just looking at one question. So if we look at a question, such as the popular one, where they ask three responses, do you prefer democracy in a authoritarian regime or does it not matter to you? Now, that one’s been asked in a lot of different countries, in a lot of different years, but there’s big gaps. Sometimes there’s two years, sometimes five years, so you can’t really do anything systematic with that.
Then, the third problem is a little more subtle, and it’s the idea that the same question has different meanings when it’s asked in different places. So even if you get the wording exact, you can’t be sure that people are interpreting it the same way. And this problem is usually described when people talk about a word like democracy, which is different interpretations, but I actually think even asking about military rule has very different meanings for people, depending on what the military… what role it’s played in that society. So, in an example like South Africa, where I’m from, the military was never very important in the authoritarian system. So people’s responses will be different to, say, an Argentina or Brazil, where it was a military regime where the military were in charge.
And then, again, we can compare, say, a Turkey where the military is often being used to support a secular interpretation of the state. So some people will favor, some will oppose. So you have to adjust for these three problems. So, basically, I came up with this [inaudible 00:09:34] statistical model that it tackles all these things at once. And what it allows is two crucial things. You can use all of the available survey data to exploit all of that variation. And you end up with what I call a smooth panel of public opinion, and that is you get a data set of national opinion, with values for every country, and you can actually do something with that.
Matt Grossmann:
He finds that politicians can overshoot public desire, even on democratic moves.
Christopher Claassen:
So, as you note, the thermostatic model began with studies of
So as you know, the thermostatic model began with studies of policy or spending with Chris Wlezien, right? It shows that aggregate opinion moves left when policy moves right, and vice versa. So to my mind, one of the best explanations of why this occurs actually comes from Jim Stimson, who talks about the overshooting that happens because of elections.
So after the election, the government doesn’t move to exactly the median voter. They overshoot because the left party gets in power, or the right party. So in the same way that an old thermostat overshoots your desired temperature, and then the average voter then tries to bring the government back by moving in the other direction.
So obviously, the big difference with democratic mood and democracy, as opposed to sort of policy mood and policy, is that… is the role of elections, which in policy mood, that’s the mechanism whereby the link happens. Whereas in democratic mood, elections are one of the thing up for grabs. It’s like, “Do you want elections or not?” That’s kind of one of the questions.
But there’s reason to think that this overshooting happens as well in democratization. So we get the same thermostatic logic. So when an authoritarian regime is in crisis, and maybe there’s a chance of democratization, they don’t usually move and drips and drabs, move a little bit to the median… the median opposition member. It usually falls apart. Sometimes they try and manage the crisis, and they try and liberalize a little bit. Usually this signals quite correctly to the opposition that the regime is weak, and therefore, they push even harder. And therefore, it completely falls apart and there’s a full democratization. So there’s the overshooting.
It goes beyond what people perhaps are asking for. And suddenly they’re a little unmoored. And the same thing happens in the opposite direction when there’s an democratization or one of these Chavezes who are undermining democratic institutions, there’s a power grab. They see in a opening. They undermine… They secure their position more than the public perhaps were demanding. And again, they’re overshooting, and now in the authoritarian direction.
So I think that really maps onto particularly Stimson’s interpretation of the thermostatic model, where the elites in this case are overshooting beyond maybe people’s insecurities about democracy, and then the public change their mind and try to pull them back by changing their opinions about democracy.
Matt Grossmann:
Croatia and Venezuela provide nice case studies of thermostatic reactions.
Christopher Claassen:
So the two stories, I guess… The first is that an increase in democracy prompts this authoritarian backlash. People turn against democracy once it’s supplied. And there’s a couple of examples which stand out, Peru and Croatia. And I think Croatia’s maybe the more obvious one.
So after its independence, Croatia was fairly authoritarian under Franjo Tudjman, but support for democracy was actually really high in the 1990s, almost at Scandinavian levels, or sort of German levels. That’s a very high support for democracy. And then after Tudjman’s death in 1999, Croatia actually transitioned to a full democracy. So you would think, “Wow, that’s fantastic,” right? This is the dream. People have got their democracy. In fact, public support fell. And it fell to sort of global average levels, which is quite a big fall from where it was. By the mid-2000s, public support for democracy in Croatia had fallen quite dramatically. So there’s a classic illustration of this authoritarian backlash once people actually get the democracy they’ve been demanding.
So the second story then is a decrease in democracy that prompts a popular resurgence in public support. So… And the classic example here is Venezuela. And in Venezuela, you can actually see in the [inaudible 00:13:58] area of plots in the article, you can see the thermostatic effect. So in the late 1990s, Venezuela was democratic, and popular support for democracy was at average levels, which is not too bad, but probably not high enough for a democratic system. So soon after Chavez was elected in 1998, he began dismantling democracy. Ultimately, Venezuela’s democracy broke down a few years later, and the public reaction couldn’t have been clearer. By the late 2000s, Venezuelans had amongst the highest levels of democratic support in the world. It’s very clear that there were demanding democratic institutions and rights, and it’s hard to resist the interpretation that they were doing this in response to these attacks that we know that Chavez was making against these democratic institutions.
Matt Grossmann:
Too much democratization is unpopular not because of majoritarian elections, but because of minoritarian institutions around the rule of law.
Christopher Claassen:
Basically, following the varieties of Democracy Project, which are the measures I use, it includes equality before the law, as well as oversight of governments, oversight provided by the judiciary as well as the legislature. So there’s a number of things which go into that, but the way I interpret it in the paper is that this is the kind of the minoritarian dilemma. And that is, it comes up in a couple of literatures. And for example, in the political tolerance literature, say, Jim Gibson, when he did his surveys in the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, some of the first surveys of democratic attitudes there, he found somewhat surprisingly that people were quite in favor of majority rule. And the basic principle of democracy seemed quite obvious, although they’d never had democracy. But tolerance, which is putting up with political enemies, giving them the full set of rights was something they struggled with. And he’s always made the case that that’s the hardest bit of democratization.
I think that’s consistent with the story where you have a judge defending the rights of a radical right or radical left person, or an unpopular minority group, or… And that’s… I think that’s difficult for many citizens to swallow, especially in new democracies, but even in established ones. And it works in both directions. So it’s when… It’s most obvious, the abuse of elites, is when they are not held to the same laws as citizens. And in the United Kingdom at the moment, the Party-Gate scandal with Boris Johnson, it’s so… It’s such a minor issue, but it’s so obviously outrageous because it is one law for them, one law for us. And it’s this notion of equal… equal rights… Are we all equal before the law?
So this works in both ways, where it’s unpopular groups, or and popular rulings that the courts make, or the legislator overruling a popular president. It’s sort of the people versus these elites, these sort of things somehow lodge in people’s minds. And the reverse, when governments themselves are not beholden to the same rules. So it’s this cluster of institutions, which we might call rule of law.
So it’s intriguing whether this extends to… or whether this includes what you call this majority minority ethnic conflict. To some extent, it’s consistent in the sense that if there is a polarized society with a minority ethnic group, and maybe polarized between majority and minority, and certain courts or political institutions are defending their political rights against the wishes of the majority who maybe hostile to them, that would certainly fit the story.
But I don’t know that there’s many societies that actually fit that bill. I would imagine like a Sri Lanka with… there’s majority minority ethnic group, there’s been decades of ethnic riots, civil war, and Sri Lanka actually ended up being undemocratic after that. So it probably wasn’t happening. But yeah, I think it’s potentially consistent, but that’s… The measures I use from the varieties of Democracy Project are not in and of themselves around ethnic conflict. So I think it’s an intriguing hypothesis, but it’s not one that’s necessarily supported by my research.
Matt Grossmann:
We don’t know whether the public loses support for majoritarian elections or just the rule of law.
Christopher Claassen:
The survey questions are pretty crude. They’re often just about regimes. Democracy or army rule. That’s generally the flavor of it. So there’s absolutely no way at present to separate people’s support for the rule of law, versus support for majoritarianism, let alone more granular institutions like judicial oversight, or universal suffrage, or what have you. And that,… I think that’s absolutely something as a discipline we need to start investing in those kind of questions.
Yeah. So… But I would say that autocrats, when they’re starting to… when they’re seeking ways of undermining democracy, they tend to go after the rule of law. And that’s probably not because they don’t care about the public support. It’s just because that’s what’s available to them. And through that, once they have the judges, and the media, and the committees and legislatures, they can then go after the voting rights and so on. Yeah. Ultimately, they may be quite hard to separate empirically in terms of the democracy side of things.
Matt Grossmann:
Goodman’s work focuses on the U.S., U.K., and Germany. She finds that citizens take elite cues about democratic threats when it fits with their partisanship.
Sara Wallace Goodman:
I think it’s the first book that really focuses on citizens, where a lot of the literature tells us what elites do. And that’s not to say that elites don’t matter. Elites are central to what citizens do, but it’s important sort of who follows the leader, who mobilizes, who doesn’t. Answering these…
Sara Wallace Goodman:
… sort of who follows the leader, who mobilizes, who doesn’t. Answering these questions are meaningful. They tell us that authoritarian power grabs can be very successful because citizens successfully take cues from in-party leaders. This is well known, but what my book adds to this is the idea that it’s context specific. Our obligation becomes defined bipartisanship. That this is cross-national. That our institutional contexts shape how we perceive incentives to respond or not to threat. And this tells us a lot about how we can expect citizens to support responses to democratic threat or not. How they themselves become political.
Matt Grossmann:
Her work developed out of research on what we require of immigrants.
Sara Wallace Goodman:
I have a large research track that looks at what immigrants have to do to become citizens. And there was just a very clear depiction in all the material I was reading that the governments in Western Europe were writing that said, to become a citizen in this country, you need to do A, B and C. And they had a very strong definition and very rigorous requirements.
In looking at these, I kept asking myself, I’m like, I wonder how much ordinary citizens believe this to be true, or how much ordinary citizens practice this kind of stuff. That is what we call, in the literature or in the field, what we call native born. How much do native born resemble these idealized definitions of good citizenship? So that was really the starting point, I guess, for this line of inquiry, and sort of spinning the telescope around and looking reflectively at the receiving society.
If you look at the material that we ask immigrants to agree to, I believe that individuals should have certain freedoms. And I believe that it’s important to be politically participatory. These are the things that appear in the to be minimally informed. So when you think about a citizenship test, that’s the kind of things that it’s trying to capture. The majority of citizens share commitments to liberal democratic values, much like we ask immigrants to do. But that’s not to say that everyone does.
Political scientists have spent now, I would say the past six years or so, really delving into this question about autocrats that live in democracies. Non-democratic citizens and democracies. And the thing is, democracies tolerate this kind of ideological diversity. Like that’s part and parcel to it. And we don’t have the mechanisms, nor should we have mechanisms to enforce ideological conformity. It’s just a question of describing how much is there. How much variation and commitments to values we have.
Matt Grossmann:
There are lots of similarities across the U.S., UK and Germany, but differences on national identity.
Sara Wallace Goodman:
So in the book, I identify three dimensions of good citizenship. That there are three different, we can think of them as categories or buckets in which different items of good citizenship can fall into. There’s behavioral items of good citizenship. So this is things like joining associations or voting, or being informed, things that you do.
A second bucket of good citizenship items are holding certain beliefs, liberal, democratic beliefs, tolerance, accepting diversity that these are liberal values that come with civic duty. And then the third bucket of items are attributes that relate to national belonging. And so you see the most similarity cross-nationally, when it comes to the first two. That in the U.S., in the UK, in Germany, good citizenship means behaving a certain way. It means believing in liberal democratic values. Those are real strong similarities across nationally. And we can say strong features of good citizenship in liberal democracies generally.
And that’s one of the benefits of comparison that we can say, these are really robust features of good citizenship in democracies. We see variation when it comes to national identity. I think those are meaningful and important differences. We see much stronger commitments to national belonging, to features of national belonging in the European cases than we do in the U.S. case. I think an interesting example is we think about two items. Being a good citizen means speaking the national language. In the European cases, that’s a very important attribute of good citizenship. In the U.S., that’s less the case.
And that stands to reason, for a majority of people, we don’t have a federal language mandate. There’s no official language. States have English language requirements about two thirds, but we see one difference on that attribute. And then a second is patriotism. So in the U.S., patriotism is very important feature of being a good citizen. Being a patriotic German or a patriotic Britan is less important to a conception of good citizenship.
Matt Grossmann:
Wallace Goodman’s book thus has implications for theories of U.S. democratic backlash, based on unique racialization.
Sara Wallace Goodman:
The U.S. is not exceptional at all in that regard. I mean, it’s exceptional with respect to the source of its descriptive definition, but it’s not exceptional to the extent that it has a descriptive definition of national belonging. If anything, I think what’s really worrying in the US-Europe comparison is how entrenched national belonging remains in European conceptions of good citizenship.
Migration scholars, we typically talk about the postwar period. And this is everything that’s happened once large scale migration started in the 1950s with guest worker programs and colonial migration to the continent. And these definitions of good citizenship endure. I’m not asking, is a good citizen someone born in the country? I purposely did not include that item because I didn’t want to necessarily trigger immigration status in thinking about it. That’s a separate question.
This is really inviting them to think about themselves or others in their community. So potentially just really thinking about other native born. And the items were randomized, so they’re not getting language first, or always first necessarily. The comparison of U.S. with European cases show us that there’s really nothing unique about descriptive notions of belonging. I think what we also gain in the comparison is that there is a plurality of opinion on what it means to be a good citizen.
By and large, those descriptive views are held by a minority. Where this conversation runs adjacent to politics of identity and electoral practices like voter suppression, is certainly important. But I think at the core, we see that because people hold really different views of good citizenship and national belonging, that we need, particularly, in all cases, really inclusive practices to hold those differences together.
Matt Grossmann:
She props people with two threats, polarization and foreign interference. The left in the U.S. and the UK respond more to polarization as a threat, perhaps because they recently lost polarized elections.
Sara Wallace Goodman:
Part of the book asks individuals to think about polarization as a democratic threat. So in the U.S., in the UK, and in Germany, I invite participants to read information about what political polarization is, and why it’s a threat. So I talk about this widening gap between individuals based on, in the U.S., partisanship. Based on being Republican, or the gap between Republicans and Democrats. In the UK, between Remainers and Leavers. So looking at that Brexit cleavage. And then in Germany, I talk about social polarization, where it has a multi-party system. So polarization is defined as something different.
So I ask them about these different cleavages in society, and then I give them information about why it’s a democratic problem. So I provide some elite framing for that to say, it’s really transformed the country. It puts us into these camps that reflect divisions and values. So this is what I invite people to think about. And in response to this sort of like information, what I find is that in the U.S. case, it’s Democrats that read that information and go, “Hmm, that is a problem.”
And we can respond to it by saying it’s the obligation of a citizen to tolerate people with different views. It’s an obligation of a citizen to accept differences. That is not a response that we see Republicans exhibit in response to that prompt. It’s also not a response that we see Leavers respond. So people that supported Brexit.
In thinking about that cross-national pattern, and this is why comparative politics is so cool, we get to see that … We look at these two different cleavages and we say, “Hmm, the people that won the last round really don’t have any incentive to do anything else.” They don’t have to respond. It’s people that are in a challenger position that didn’t like the outcome upon which this cleavage appears to be based, that want to do something. That think they can do something. There is a deeper question here about whether it’s they have a psychological agency, or they identify psychological agency, but it’s this really-
… or they identify psychological agency, but it’s this really interesting pattern about that reveals that democratic problems are not seen as… It’s not like a pan-… I shouldn’t even say it’s not like a pandemic, because it turns out that the pandemic is quite similarly partisan. See pandemic politics forthcoming. No, but it’s not like a terrorist attack that people see this problem through the lens of their own interests. That’s a problem because then it politicizes potential solutions.
Matt Grossmann:
In responses to Russian interference prompts, Americans didn’t change their views much.
Sara Wallace Goodman:
We find effects in the UK and we find effects in Germany and we don’t find effects in the US. And I spend some time talking about this in the book, and I think it’s meaningful that there were no actual consequences to this interference that people really like. The survey was fielded in 2019, so we’re already really far down the timeline in terms of how this has been adjudicated in the public, how this played out politically. I think agency and interest are really low in response to that kind of prompt, and that also is a problem. That we can agree, so like what I did was I asked whether they agreed that it was a problem first. So people largely agree it’s a problem, but it doesn’t affect how they view their agency or their role as a citizen is in response to that problem. That makes sense, I mean, what can you and I do about foreign interference in election? It is not the same as polarization, which exists among us.
Matt Grossmann:
Clausen finds that the US story mostly fits the international pattern. But most of our recent democratic increases were around elections.
Christopher Claassen:
According to the varieties of democracy project, there was actually a mild but sustained increase in democracy in the United States from 2001. After that, there was a small fall after 9/11. From then until about 2010, there was a small but marked increase. Now, at the same time, there was the mild but sustained decrease in democratic support, pretty mild, but it’s there. It’s not the best fit in case, and if that was the only case we had, we wouldn’t say there’s a thermostatic effect. I would say, however, that I don’t believe the changes in terms of democracy were about the rule of law. I think it was electoral rights. I think that’s where the increase was happening, so it’s not, I wouldn’t say it’s the best fitting case.
Matt Grossmann:
Increased or decreased voting rights alone probably wouldn’t matter for democratic support. But might if they spilled over to court action.
Christopher Claassen:
If it is voting rights, now that is, strictly speaking, that’s part of the electoral cluster of institutions, which I found changes in that alone don’t really move democratic support. But you could imagine the court’s getting involved, right? The court’s defending political, and then suddenly it’s also the rule of law, and then maybe the answer’s more nuanced. But then is it the courts against the people or is it going to be seen as the courts defending an unpopular minority or is it going to be the courts defending popular rights? Which you might see in a very different way. I don’t think it’s a classical pattern that we would see in terms of this is going to prompt further decreases or increases in democratic support.
Matt Grossmann:
The practical lesson is that early democracy is more vulnerable. But when democracy is under attack, there is an opportunity for democratic reformers.
Christopher Claassen:
The early years of a new democracy are the most fraught, and there’s a generation maybe where it’s things can really fall apart. I think some of what an article shows is some new insight into that. It’s not necessarily, oh, economic chaos, which may be ongoing as well, it’s that that’s the moment when support is the lowest. People suddenly get democracy and it’s like, “Oh, that’s support falls.” It’s to navigate those shores somehow. It does fade, and within a decade people will be back again. Then the other interpretation is what you’ve already suggested, and that is when democracy is being attacked, that is a great opportunity because the public then are favorable for maybe interventions. Or maybe a regional organization being supportive and critical of that leader, and that’s the moment and it does fade as we see with Venezuela.
Matt Grossmann:
But there might be another warning sign, performance does not usually affect democratic support but violent crime does reduce it.
Christopher Claassen:
We find that generally support for democracy with one exception, which I’ll talk about, with one exception, it’s not affected by a regime performance. We have a lot of new measures in this paper, so it’s economic growth, it’s healthcare provision. Because he wrote this during the pandemic, so to what extent does the system have a quality healthcare system? It’s all over time changes. So none of that really affects support for democracy. It does affect satisfaction with democracy in a big way. And there’s no spill over effect from economic growth. So it affects satisfaction and democracy, but that doesn’t then, down the road, affect support.
Now the one exception, which affects both measures of system support is violent crime. The violent crime rate does impact democratic support in a negative way, obviously. That does undermine it, so changes in violent crime increases does harm democratic support. In terms of performance, and there’s this long standing debate between people who say that, ultimately, it’s an economic process. It’s something you just need economic growth and people’s support, instrumentally, they’ll support democracy. There’s actually not that much evidence for that particular claim as we find. But crime seems to be different. A lot of the democracies which seem to be striking with support, which have included Brazil, South Africa, the Philippines, Venezuela are places where crime is pretty high, so there’s a prima facie evidence for that.
Matt Grossmann:
Where does that leave us? Wallace Goodman says citizens do have to maintain support for democracy. Without it, democracy is threatened.
Sara Wallace Goodman:
There has to be this compatibility between what the citizens want and what the regime does, pursued by different governments at different periods of time. The idea is that those governments can change while pursuing those goals. That is part and parcel to the understanding that people can lose elections, the regime goals are relatively stable across transfers of power. I think this has started to break down and that we’ve really turned a corner, so democratic threat today is different than democratic threat in previous generations. That we don’t believe that governments can change power and continue to pursue those democratic goals, or that those democratic goals are not safeguarded regardless of party and power.
Matt Grossmann:
Her open-ended responses show some variation, but mostly agreement.
Sara Wallace Goodman:
It was really important for me to actually hear voices. It was important for me to hear in people’s own words what they thought about these threats, and so I carefully thought of ways to ask them, non-leading ways to ask them, what they thought about this information just to kind of reflect on it. Wow, I got some… There’s nothing better than reading through qualitative open-ended responses when you ask people about threat. Later, what I was able to do is with a team of research is to code this up and to have a measure of agreement or disagreement with the prompt. But you got some really colorful responses. But, by and large, people are really reasonable. That was the takeaway.
At the margins, you always have a crazy uncle at dinner but everyone else is pretty fine. I think that’s the similar representation occurred in the surveys. There is no one more colorful than the British when answering an open-ended response, I will say. You get some real choice language which I just try to include as footnotes were possible. Gosh, that was just like a lot of fun to read through. It makes you feel like you’re actually communicating with people when you’re just looking at surveys.
Matt Grossmann:
But we’re in a difficult pattern without an easy institutional way out.
Sara Wallace Goodman:
By changing institutions, or a lot of people talk about ridding the US system of counter-majoritarian institutions that we can improve democratic outcomes. That’s correct, and that’s what I get to show by comparing Germany’s multi-party system with Britain’s multi-party system with the US. But that’s so hard to do. How do you do that? I just want everyone to have the chance to vote. Let’s start there. The mountain is so high and we don’t have the right shoes for the conditions.
Matt Grossmann:
There’s a lot more to learn. The science of politics is available biweekly from the Niskanen Center, and part of the Democracy Group network. I’m your host, Matt Grossman. If you like this discussion, you should check out our previous episodes, the US democratic decline in comparative perspective. Why do Americans accept democratic backsliding? Who’s more afraid of democracy, the center or the right? How much did Trump undermine US democracy? And do Americans implicitly trust government despite our public anger? Thanks to Christopher Clausen and Sara Wallace Goodman for joining me. Please check out In the Mood for Democracy and Citizenship in Hard Times, and then listen in next time.