Democratic Values and Authoritarian Legitimacy (DEVAL)
UKRI-funded ERC Starting Grant (EP/Y036832/1).
Project Overview
Democracy provides important political, social, and economic benefits. Democratic governments are more likely to protect human rights, their economies tend to grow more quickly, and on average they are less corrupt, more effective at promoting health and well-being, and less belligerent internationally. Given these democratic advantages, it’s perhaps no surprise that most people in most countries say they want to be governed democratically. Yet, over the past decade, this persistent popular support for democracy has coincided with stalling democratization, backsliding in several leading democracies, and resurging authoritarian powers in international politics.
This project seeks to contribute to democratic resilience by studying when and why popular support for democracy is more robust, while also diagnosing why this support can sometimes facilitate authoritarian political outcomes rather than strengthening democracy. DEVAL does so by focusing on three possible explanations for this disconnect. First, people can have different understandings of what democracy means, so it is possible that expressions of democratic support in fact reflect authoritarian preferences and attitudes. Second, people may approve of democracy but decide that it is not important enough compared to other outcomes, whether economic prosperity or security. Third, authoritarian political leaders can sometimes convince the public that their governance is democratic, such that they paradoxically benefit from popular support for democracy. To assess the relevance of these explanations, DEVAL focuses on the following three research questions.
How does understanding of democracy vary across and within countries?
How robust is support for democracy to political, economic, and social trade-offs over time and across countries?
How do authoritarian political leaders use democratic rhetoric and institutions to increase their own popular support?
DEVAL will advance existing research on these questions by developing new methodological tools within a multi-methods framework that combines analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data. This data will be collected from countries in different regions of the world to facilitate generalizable conclusions about when people are more committed to democracy, and why this democratic support can sometimes strengthen authoritarian political leaders and regimes.