Downsizing Democracy: Why Ordinary People Acquiesce to Authoritarianism

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

This project develops a theoretical framework that explains when and why incumbents succeed in subverting democracy and evaluates this framework using a combination of cross-country data and a series of survey experiments. The study thus advances scientific knowledge and research on democratization, electoral authoritarianism, and public support for democracy. The results of this project will include cross-national country-level data on the subversion of democracy by incumbents and survey-experimental data on public support for democracy. This project will also provide academic training and research experience for a number of graduate student assistants who will be involved in the design, execution, analysis, and data management of nationally-representative survey experiments in several countries. The goal of this project is to address theoretically and empirically a fundamental question about the survival of democracy: when can we realistically expect the public to serve as a check on the authoritarian temptations of elected politicians? Theoretically, the project identifies a general mechanism and structural conditions that account for this vulnerability: voters' willingness to trade off democratic principles for partisan interests and the role of polity-wide political polarization in enabling such trade-offs. The project develops a game-theoretic framework that clarifies how voters' willingness to make such trade-offs at the micro-level results in the subversion of democracy by incumbents at the macro level. This framework is empirically evaluated using a combination of cross-country data and a series of survey experiments designed to credibly elicit voters' willingness to trade off democratic principles for competing political goals in a number of critical cases. The survey-experimental design employs candidate-choice experiments as an indirect questioning technique while emphasizing cross-country comparability and structural identification. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.