Worldwide surveys about democracy

I studied worldwide surveys about approval of different political regimes and could not figure out what they are intended to reveal or what they do reveal.

Here are the questions and the potential answers asked by the two worldwide surveys:

World Values Survey (WVS):

“I’m going to describe various types of political systems and ask what you think about each as a way of governing this country. For each one, would you say it is a very good, fairly good, fairly bad or very bad way of governing this country?”

V163. Having a democratic political system.

V164. Having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country.

V165. Having the army rule the country.

V166. Having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections

Regional Barometers:

“There are many ways to govern a country. Would you disapprove or approve of the following alternatives?”

Q: “One-man rule?” / “Presidents who do not need the consent of parliament or elections?”

Q: “Military rule?” / “The army governing the country?”

Q: “One-party rule?” / “Only one political party being allowed to stand for election and hold office?”

I downloaded the data from the World Values Studies. The earliest survey was in 1995, the latest in 2023. I calculated the average ratings of different regimes for particular countries in the years the surveys were conducted. They go from 1, which is a full approval of a regime, to 4, which is a full rejection.

WVS asks respondents to rate democracy, a system governed by a strong leader, a system governed by experts, and army rule. I compared the responses of people living in democracies with those not living in democracies, where I followed the regime classification by Boix, Miller, and Rosato (BMR). There were more surveys in democracies, 150, than in autocracies, 75. Here are the results:

Democracy is rated far above other regimes everywhere. What I find surprising is that these postures are not endogenous. People living in autocracies rate all regimes as better than those living in democracies and, while the differences are statistically significant, they are numerically tiny. This contradicts my prior beliefs: I always thought that people approve of the regimes they live under. I expected that while people living in democracies would score it well, people living in autocracies led by powerful leaders would rate them better than democracy.

Here are the ratings of regimes by people living in the US and in China (remember lower score is better):

The Chinese ratings of democracy (and of expert rule) do not differ from those of people living in the post-1999 United States. Yet surveys in China repeatedly report that an overwhelming majority support its current system. Since in American eyes the Chinese system is not a democracy, how is it possible that the Chinese value democracy as much as Americans and yet approve of the system which is not a democracy? The most plausible answer is here: “Tianjian Shi and Lu Jie demonstrated with empirical data that in China the popular understanding of t he concept of “democracy” does not match the meaning defined in the liberal democracy discourse; rather, it is based on the guardianship discourse. There is a widely shared view among ordinary Chinese people that “democracy” means government for the people and by elites, rather than government by the people.” (Chu 2011). Hence, Americans support democracy, which they are taught is their system; Chinese support democracy, which they are taught is their system; only that democracy means something different in the two countries. With different meanings attached to “democracy,” there is no contradictions and postures toward it are endogenous. But, then, international comparisons of these surveys make no sense.

Moreover, people who spent their lives living under a particular regime do not have a faintest idea what life would have been like under the alternatives proposed by these surveys. Ms. Smith, living in Iowa, has been indoctrinated to choose V163 from the WVS cafeteria; Ms. Zhou, living in Guandong, to choose V166. Same with the alternatives posed by the Barometers: Ms. Smith would opt for democracy, Ms. Zhou for one-party rule. Neither knows what living under the counterfactual system would be like. These questions are just inane. They may measure the satisfaction with the regimes someone lives under but -- except for people who lived under more than one regime, myself included -- they ask people if they would prefer to live on the earth or on the moon.

These alternatives are not just innocently inane. For people living in democracies, they formulate alternatives which most people do not entertain. Does Ms. Smith ask herself what would be like to live under military rule? She may be dissatisfied with the democracy really existing in the US and may have views about how to reform it, for example, limit the influence of money over politics, equalize political influence across districts or states, abolish the electoral college, ..., some reforms. M. Dupont living in France may have views about proposals to change the electoral system, about the idea of citizen’s assemblies considering particular policies, about a more frequent use of referendums, ..., again, the list of potential reforms is long. None of these possibilities -- possibilities of improving democracy -- are on the menu of answers. Instead, the potential answers insinuate that people dissatisfied with the way democracy functions in their countries envisage living under some form of autocracy. Forcing such choices on the respondents rings alarm bells -- echoed in newspaper headlines -- but only by denying to us the possibility of reforming the democratic institutions under which we live.

The reason I decided to plunge into this topic is to dispel some attention grabbing headlines. Here is a graph of ratings of democracy in the range in which they are observed. It shows that evaluations of democracy plummeted after 2008. Hence, “a crisis of democracy.”

Now look at the same graph but using the entire scale of possible evaluations of democracy, which is 1 to 4:

Almost all ratings are within 1.6 to 1.7 range over the entire period. Nothing has changed since the survey began.

Originally, I was wondering whether the ratings of democracy predict the breakdowns of democratic regimes: presumably they are intended to sound alarm bells. This question, however, cannot be answered because there are few observations in which either anti-democratic coups took place or BMR coded a breakdown of democracy for which survey data are available within five prior years. There are only 8 anti-democratic coups which occurred within five years following a survey and only 5 breakdowns of democracy. Hence, the predictive power of the surveys cannot be assessed.

In the end, I wonder what these surveys tell us.

Reference:

Chu, Yun-han. 2011. “Sources of Regime Legitimacy and the Debate over the Chinese Model.” Working paper. Academia Sinica.