Democracy-Assessment in Cross-National Surveys: A Critical Examination of How People Evaluate Their Regime

Gal Ariely ()

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2015, vol. 121, issue 3, 635 pages

Abstract: Despite doubts regarding their validity and comparability, survey questions relating to the assessment of democracy remain a common feature of cross-national studies. This paper examines the way in which they are formulated in the World Values Survey 2005 by investigating their association with questions relating to a genuine understanding of democracy and the actual level of democracy in the countries surveyed. A multilevel analysis across 47 countries revealed that the level of democracy in a country is related to the relationship between a genuine understanding of democracy and democracy-assessment. While these relations are positive in democracies, they are insignificant in non-democratic countries. The implications of these findings for examining democratic attitudes across countries via the use of such survey questions are discussed. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Democratic attitudes; Satisfaction from democracy; Public opinion; Cross-national surveys; World Values Survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11205-014-0666-y (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:soinre:v:121:y:2015:i:3:p:621-635

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-014-0666-y

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().