The increase in political polarization and the emergence of populist parties with authoritarian tendencies generate much concern about citizens’ adherence to democracy and the durability of liberal institutions today. Researchers from the University of Barcelona and Princeton University have used an innovative methodology to estimate how much citizens value democracy and other economic and social aspects, such as having a public health system or living in an egalitarian society.
The results, based on experiments integrated into surveys carried out in France, Brazil and the United States, and published in the journal PNAS, show that citizens’ income would have to triple for them to give up having free elections. Given this strong democratic support, the study concludes that democracy could not be endangered both by citizen disaffection and by possible actions of undemocratic minorities.
“Although an authoritarian minority exists in all three countries, the formation of a non-democratic majority (that would offer more income and/or other goods to respondents) is very unlikely. These results imply that, contrary to the growing discussion about a possible crisis of democracy, liberal democratic values ??remain substantially robust in high- and middle-income democracies,” explains Carles Boix, Robert Garrett Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and director of the Institutions and Political Economy Research Group (IPErG). from the Faculty of Economics and Business of the UB, who wrote the article in collaboration with professors Alícia Adserà (Princeton University) and Andreu Arenas (UB and Barcelona Institute of Economics).
The study arises in a context in which recent research has detected processes of reversal of democratic guarantees and practices initiated by democratically elected officials. Faced with this threat, the objective of the work was to find out to what extent popular support for democratic institutions is robust. With this objective, the researchers designed a methodology based on surveys of 2,000 participants from each of the three countries, in which they did not ask direct questions but rather asked respondents to rate various societies that vary randomly in characteristics such as degree of economic development, income inequality, democracy or the health system.
Researchers have used these evaluations to determine the value of democracy with respect to other characteristics that also vary randomly, such as the individual income that respondents would have in these hypothetical societies.
“The objective is to calculate the price of democracy and other economic and social features, and we do it by considering the choice of these characteristics as if it were a real world, where we are used to choosing between different things, taking into account the trade-offs. offs (the cost-benefit relationship) that can occur when we must choose between different goods. Therefore, it is a method that also allows us to estimate the value that a public health system, an equal society, etc. has among the population. In fact “We believe that this methodology can be useful for economists and other social scientists when designing institutions and evaluating different policies,” highlights Carles Boix.
The selection of countries (Brazil, France and the United States) has allowed, according to the researchers, to analyze different degrees of economic development and political institutions in states in which authoritarian and anti-globalization politicians have achieved high levels of popularity, such as Bolsonaro, Le Pen and Trump.
The results obtained in the three countries indicate that citizens’ income would have to be multiplied by three for them to give up having free elections. This is a much greater “compensation”, for example, than what they ask for for giving up other collective goods. The only good with a price close to that of democracy is that of a public health system: income would have to be doubled for the French to give it up, for example.
Although the researchers have detected a minority that would prefer not to live in democracy regardless of the rest of the characteristics of society – they are around a fifth of those surveyed – they also note a strong pro-democratic supermajority that would need substantial monetary compensation to give up elections. free. “This amount is important and we interpret it in the sense that support for democracy is considerable and that reaching an illiberal majority is very difficult,” says Carles Boix.
According to the study, these results make it difficult for politicians to violate central democratic norms and institutions and at the same time maintain electoral support, at least in middle- and high-income democracies like those analyzed. “The conclusion is that the crisis of democracy, if it is to come, will not come from what some researchers call democratic backsliding (the erosion of democratic practices and institutions by elected officials), but from minorities opposed to democracy with the capacity to coordinate to prevail over the rest. This last situation has been the historically typical path that has led to the fall of democracies,” concludes Professor Boix, who has already begun working to extend the study to other countries.
