The Value of Democracy across the World

• In Event: Inequality and Democracy

Abstract

How much do individuals value democratic institutions, a robust welfare state, or living in a merit-based society? If they had to choose between them (or, at least, rate each one of them relative to the rest), which one would they prefer? What value or weight do they give to every one of these collective outcomes relative to individual outcomes such as their personal income?

We elicit and measure the preferences of citizens about these different features of society through a series of conjoint experiments where survey participants were asked to rate and choose between different societies that randomly vary in their economic outcomes (country income, income inequality, social mobility), political outcomes (democracy, welfare state, level of crime/violence), and the level of personal income for each respondent.

We implement our analysis in a sample of rich dictatorships and low- and middle-income democracies and dictatorships (Argentina, China, India, Nigeria, South Africa and Singapore), extending our previous work in three democracies with mid to high income (Adsera, Arenas & Boix, “Estimating the value of democracy relative to other institutional and economic outcomes among citizens in Brazil, France, and the United States”, PNAS, 2023).

The paper several contributions:

(1) It measures citizens’ preferences in a set-up that arguably approaches real-world choices more closely than previous studies.

(2) Because it randomizes the assignment of individual income (as well as other economic parameters), it generates a novel set of computational procedures to calculate the “price” of democracy or any other societal feature, to quantify the trade-offs involved in the choice of institutions, and to investigate the particular social coalitions that may sustain a specific institutional and economic configuration.

(3) It contributes directly the growing literature on democratic backsliding and democratic resilience.

Authors

• Carles Boix, Princeton University

• Alicia Adsera, Princeton University

• Andreu Arenas, Princeton University & University of Barcelona (IEB, IPErG)