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.
Prominent recent work argues that support for democracy behaves thermostatically—that democratic erosion boosts democratic support while deepening democracy yields public backlash—and further contends that there is no evidence for the classic argument that democracy itself increases democratic support over time. Here, we document how these conclusions depend on subtle choices in measurement coding that constitute “researcher degrees of freedom”: analyses employing alternative reasonable choices provide little or no support for the original conclusions.