Citizen Support for Democratic and Autocratic Regimes by Marlene Mauk;

Author:Marlene Mauk; [Mauk, Marlene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192597137
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2020-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

The picture looks much more clear-cut for the two individual-level sources associated with the institutionalist tradition of research on regime support, which are linked to regime support through a generalization of experiences: democratic performance evaluations and systemic performance evaluations. Both democratic performance evaluations and systemic performance evaluations have a significant and substantial positive effect on regime support in democracies (Model D1, Table 5.1). Citizens who evaluate their political regime as very democratic are considerably more supportive of this political regime than citizens who find their political regime very undemocratic. This supports the theoretical model, which predicted a positive effect of democratic performance evaluations on regime support. The same is true for the predictions regarding the effect of systemic performance evaluations on regime support. Within the democracies covered by the combined analysis, citizens with more favorable evaluations of their political regime’s systemic performance—those who feel safer in their neighborhood or city—express significantly more regime support than citizens who feel unsafe and evaluate the regime’s systemic performance as poor.

Model D2 in Table 5.1 additionally includes the interaction term between political value orientations and democratic performance evaluations. On the one hand, this adds some insight into how citizens’ evaluations of the regime’s democratic quality condition the effect of their political value orientations on regime support. On the other hand, it provides a test of the prediction that the effect of democratic performance evaluations becomes larger for individuals who value democracy more, i.e. have more democratic political value orientations.

As Model D2 shows, the interaction term between political value orientations and democratic performance evaluations (pvo x dpe) is indeed positive as well as statistically significant. This corroborates the theoretical conjecture which predicted the effect of democratic political value orientations to become more positive for individuals who evaluate their regime’s democratic performance more favorably. Figure 5.5 (left panel) graphically displays the interaction effect: it plots the average marginal effects of political value orientations on regime support for different levels of democratic performance evaluations. The results demonstrate that political value orientations, in fact, exert a significant negative effect on regime support for those individuals who view their political regime as very undemocratic. In contrast, for those individuals who view their political regime as very democratic, more democratic political value orientations actually increase support for the political regime. As we can clearly see from the figure, democratic political value orientations only decrease regime support if citizens think their own political regime is undemocratic; as soon as citizens judge their own political regime to be on the democratic side of the spectrum (crossing the scale mean of 0.5), democratic political value orientations start to have a positive effect on regime support. More democratic political value orientations, then, do not automatically decrease support for the democratic regime-in-practice. The results demonstrate that it is rather the concurrence of democratic political value orientations and negative evaluations of the regime’s democratic performance that leads to a drop in regime support.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.