Christopher Claassen: The Democracy-Support Nexus Revisited

Recent research has demonstrated several connections between the presence and vitality of a democratic system and public support toward that system: firstly, that public support helps to sustain democracy, and secondly, that changes in democracy prompt an immediate and opposite thermostatic reaction in public opinion. We revisit these links (and others) in the democracy-support nexus, using Bayesian MCMC methods to include measurement uncertainty in democracy, public mood towards democracy, and satisfaction with democracy, and to simultaneously estimate the links between these three variables. Substantively, we confirm both the supportive effect of mood on democracy and the thermostatic effect of democratic change on mood. However we also show that the method by which measurement uncertainty is included matters at least as much as whether such uncertainty is included at all.

Christopher Claassen is a senior lecturer in politics at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. His research on political support, attitudes to immigrants, and measurement of public opinion has been published in journals such as American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Political Analysis.