Gauging Preference for Democracy in Absence of Free Speech

Josie I Chen, Louis Putterman and Diego Ramos-Toro

No 2023-005, Working Papers from Brown University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Whether people prefer a democratic system is difficult to judge when speaking freely carries personal dangers. We introduce an incentivized experimental task to reveal implicit preference for democracy without referencing politically-sensitive terms. We validate the task with data from émigrés from Greater China living in North America, demonstrating our experimental tool’s ability to gauge favorability toward democracy when participants come from backgrounds where eliciting such views is challenging. We corroborate the task’s accuracy and its ability to uncover patterns in democratic sentiment with data from a representative US sample and from a diverse set of participants in China.

Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna and nep-pol
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