Autocratization and Survey Experiments

Jeremy Springman

University of Pennsylvania

Global Development: Intermediate Topics in Politics, Policy, and Data

PSCI 3200 - Spring 2024

Logistics

Assignments

  • Today
    • 3 readings
    • Ensure Quarto is installed
  • Thursday
    • Create a git repo for this class (psci3200_yourname)
    • DSS Ch4

Agenda

  1. Finishing up Final Project
  2. RStudio and Quarto
  3. Survey Experiments
    1. Overview
    2. Albertus & Grossman
    3. Hollerbauer et al.

Final Project

Examples of research questions

  • Do citizens with mobile internet access have more negative opinions about their government?
  • Do citizens that migrate have more or less positive views about democracy?
  • Are domestic media outlets less likely to report on political events after elections?

RStudio and Quarto

Poll

  • Mac vs Windows vs Other?
  • Quarto running?

Instructions

  • Follow-along as I create a quarto page
  • Submit the html for the page to me via Slack before the end of class

Survey Experiments

What are survey experiments?


Two general uses

  • Measuring sensitive attitudes
    • Providing anonymity
  • Identifying causal effect
    • Manipulating images and text

List Experiments

  • What can list experiments tell us?
    • prevalence of the sensitive attitude in the survey population
  • What can they not tell us
    • attitude of any individual respondent
  • When might this be useful?
    • Assessing prevalence of something
    • Quantifying measurement bias/misreporting

List Experiments

Randomized Response

  • What is it?
    • Induce some \(p > 0\) that you say “Yes” even if you disagree
  • Pitfalls
    • Complexity, confusion
    • Lack of anonymity
  • Variants
    • Repeated randomized response
    • Crosswise

Priming

  • What is it?
    • Measures implicit attitudes by stimulating unconscious association
  • Pitfalls
    • Hard to know if the prime worked (false negative, confounding, etc.)

Vignettes and Factorials

  • What is it?
    • Presents a scenario while varying key components
  • Pitfalls
    • Unrealistic combinations
    • Limited power

Conjoints

  • What is it?
    • Presents pair of profiles while varying attributes
    • Asks respondents to choose between profiles
  • Pitfalls
    • Requires careful attention
    • Can be highly synthetic

Albertus & Grossman

Background

Decline in the quantity and quality of democracies

  • Executive power grabs rather than coups
  1. Weaken judiciary and media independence
  2. Purge bureaucracy and neutralize legislature
  3. Reduce political competition through legal changes

Research Questions

  1. Why do many voters support or ignore antidemocratic actions?
  2. Why are transgressions rarely punished?
  3. How is public opinion affected by means and justification?

Research Question

Why don’t citizens resist?

  • Citizens don’t realize
    • Should identify and oppose
  • Citizens are conditional democrats (trade-off w/ideology)
    • Should identify and support conditional on ideology
  • Citizens may have differing conceptions of democracy
    • Don’t identify as antidemocratic

What’s the Research Design?

Vignette Experiment

  • Manipulation
    • Antidemocratic behavior
    • Partisan alignment
    • Means and justifications
  • Outcomes
    • Perceived as antidemocratic
    • Support for action
    • Support for punishment

Findings

  • Positive
    • Respondents identify antidemocratic actions and oppose them
    • Means and justifications do not increase support
  • Negative
    • Significant minority supports antidemocratic actions
    • Partisan power increases support

Editorial Notes


Pushes back against polarization based explanations, which predict that people support antidemocratic behaviors because they view the other side as so dangerous

Policy Implications?

  • Normalize punishment
  • Emphasize long-run risks

Hollerbauer

jrspringman.github.io/psci3200-globaldev/