Is Popular Support for Democracy Underreported? Evidence From 32 African Countries

Abstract

The development of cross-national barometers such as the World Values Survey or the Global Barometer Surveys has given rise to a large bulk of studies on democratic support outside the West. Many of these studies involve cross-country comparisons of aggregate data in order to gauge the prevalence of democratic attitudes in the developing world (e.g., Shin, 2007; Tessler & Gao, 2005) or to analyze the relationships between mass attitudes and political regime type (Fails & Pierce, 2010). Such investigations typically rest on standard survey items that explicitly refer to “democracy.” The success of such items is easy to understand: these are straightforward questions that have strong face validity and allow for quick cross-country comparisons. However, their apparent simplicity makes these indicators vulnerable to biases that compromise their ability to capture real commitment to democratic values. First, the word “democracy” does not travel well across cultures and might be understood differently from one individual to another (Ariely & Davidov, 2011). Second, the term carries strong connotations, which might be either positive or negative depending on each country’s political context: on the one hand, democracy now enjoys a broadly positive image, which might induce respondents to give socially desirable responses; on the other hand, respondents favorable to democracy might be too afraid to openly endorse it—a problem Kuran (1989) calls “preference falsification.” Both problems are especially acute in transitioning countries and new democracies, in which the measurement of attitudes toward democracy may yield significant rates of false positives or false negatives, or even a mixture of both.