We test our 17 questions in 19 countries. We find that disjunctures in how our item cohere reveal faultlines in political cultures that can be exploited by authoritarians. We also identify a set of 7 items that provide a reliable and valid measure of public support for liberal democracy. [3/3]

The fact that human rights don't seem to really come into this is interesting.

Paper here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

hi chris (et al): we wrote a book about some of these tensions recently. look forward to reading the paper.

Democracy's Meanings

Democracy’s Meanings challenges conventional wisdom regarding how the public thinks about and evaluates democracy. Mining both political theory and more than 75 years of public opinion data, the boo...