Gauging Preference for Democracy in Absence of Free Speech
39 Pages Posted: 1 Aug 2023
Date Written: July 28, 2023
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.
Keywords: democracy, autocracy, experiment, survey, preferences, China
JEL Classification: C90, P00, D72, D90
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