Publication Date:
2015-03-07
Description:
Democracies depend on the support of the general population, but little is known about the determinants of this support. We investigated whether support for democracy increases with the length of time spent under the system and whether preferences are thus affected by the political system. Relying on 380,000 individual-level observations from 104 countries over the years 1994 to 2013, and exploiting individual-level variation within a country and a given year in the length of time spent under democracy, we find evidence that political preferences are endogenous. For new democracies, our findings imply that popular support needs time to develop. For example, the effect of around 8.5 more years of democratic experience corresponds to the difference in support for democracy between primary and secondary education.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Fuchs-Schundeln, Nicola -- Schundeln, Matthias -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2015 Mar 6;347(6226):1145-8. doi: 10.1126/science.aaa0880.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Goethe University Frankfurt, 60320 Frankfurt, Germany. fuchs@wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de schuendeln@wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25745172" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Adolescent
;
Adult
;
Child
;
*Democracy
;
Educational Status
;
Female
;
Humans
;
*Individuality
;
Male
;
Middle Aged
;
*Social Values
;
Young Adult
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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