Public discontent with the political system has become an increasingly salient concern in recent years, with the argument that it undermines democratic stability and effective governance. Nevertheless, the understanding of the nature, trends, and drivers of political discontent remains debated, largely reflecting the constraints from available survey data and items in the construction of measurement. This article takes advantage of the state-of-the-art latent-variable modeling to aggregat survey responses and a comprehensive collection of survey data to generate dynamic comparative estimates of public political discontent (PPD) for over a hundred countries over the past four decades.
Do personalist leaders erode public trust in democracy, or are they a symptom of its decline? The election of personalist leaders—whose party cannot effectively check them—and the declining public trust in democracy are often cited as evidence for democratic backsliding. But we lack a theoretical understanding of their dynamics, nor did we have empirical data to examine their relationship globally. This paper, using two novel global datasets based on latent response model, is the first to investigate the causal relations between personalist leaders and public trust in democracy in a long panel of cross-national data.
Does generalized trust play a role in the public’s tax compliance? Traditional wisdom claims that generalized trust can affect the public’s compliance with paying taxes by reducing concerns about free-riders and facilitating public goods provision. However, there is little empirical evidence of a statistically significant relationship between generalized trust and tax morale in comparative studies. I argue that the dominant role of generalized trust in tax morale depends on the democratic development of institutions.
Prominent recent works have measured democratic support using a single latent variable that purports to span a single dimension from steadfast opposition to whole-hearted support. This ignores ample evidence that support for democracy is complex and multidimensional. Here we provide a series of validation tests of the sort of cross-national time-series latent variable measures employed in recent research by reference to questions on support for liberal democracy and opposition to its erosion from multiwave surveys conducted around the world.
Do democratic regimes depend on public support to avoid backsliding? Does public support, in turn, respond thermostatically to changes in democracy? Two prominent recent studies (Claassen 2020a; 2020b) reinvigorated the classic hypothesis on the positive relationship between public support for democracy and regime survival—and challenged its reciprocal counterpart—by using a latent variable approach to measure mass democratic support from cross-national survey data. However, both studies used only the point estimates of democratic support.