Scott Williamson publishes new paper in Science on defining democracy

DPIR’S Scott Williamson, Associate Professor of Comparative Political Economy, has co-authored a new paper, published in the journal Science, exploring how people around the world define democracy.

The paper was co-authored with Jonathan Chu of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and Eddy Yeung, a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Emory University.

The topic is particularly pertinent at present as countries face democratic backsliding and authoritarian governments promote alternative notions of democracy.

In the paper, Scott and his co-authors discover strikingly consistent views on what constitutes a “democratic” country from survey experiments conducted in the US, Italy, Egypt, India, Thailand, and Japan. 

Across countries and diverse subgroups within countries, people similarly emphasise free and fair elections and civil liberties as key determinants of democracy. Countries that produce desirable social and economic outcomes are also considered more democratic, but these and other factors exert a smaller and less consistent effect than elections and civil liberties.

Scott said: 

The key message we would want readers to take away is this: Despite attempts by dictators and other anti-democratic politicians to redefine democracy in ways that benefit them, our experimental evidence suggests that people generally continue to understand democracy in terms of competitive elections and strong protections for civil liberties. 

This shared understanding is an important foundation from which people can push back against democratic violations by political leaders.

I'm excited for our findings to be published in Science, and I hope they can speak to important debates right now about the resilience of democratic support globally.”

Over the next few years, Scott will be continuing to work on several related studies that examine variation in how people understand democracy as well as the circumstances under which people are more or less committed to democratic governance