DEVAL - Democratic Values and Authoritarian Legitimacy

DEVAL将通过推进人们如何理解和支持民主的知识，以及威权政治领导人如何操纵这种对民主价值观的普遍支持，以提高他们的政治合法性，来研究在全球民主衰落的时刻，民众对民主的态度。民主的传播在全世界都有重要的好处，但全球趋势已经转向威权主义。公众对民主的支持是维持民主治理的一个重要因素，因此必须准确评估有多少支持，何时更有可能加强民主。现有的研究依赖于可能夸大民主支持的措施，忽视了这种支持如何在某些情况下促进独裁的结果。通过设计新的方法来确定人们如何理解民主以及人们如何将民主与其他政治，社会和经济成果进行交易，DEVAL将在衡量民主支持方面取得突破性进展。DEVAL还将推进专制领导人通过利用民主价值观来加强其合法性的策略的理论和经验知识。DEVAL将依靠一种创新的多方法方法，结合调查，实验，访谈和焦点小组来分析支持民主的性质和后果，其方式比当前文献中存在的更细致入微，更全面。为了实现这一目标，该项目将重点关注精心挑选的10个国家，以提供地区，发展和政权类型的变化。DEVAL项目将为我们的方法和理论提供最先进的进步，以了解人们如何珍视民主，以及这种支持有时如何促进威权主义。这项研究将对如何应对全球独裁趋势的辩论具有重要意义。

DEVAL will examine popular attitudes toward democracy in a moment of global democratic decline by advancing knowledge of how people understand and support democracy, and how authoritarian political leaders manipulate this popular support for democratic values to increase their political legitimacy. The spread of democracy has important benefits worldwide, but the global trend has shifted back toward authoritarianism. Public support for democracy is an important factor for sustaining democratic governance, so it is important to develop an accurate appraisal of how much support exists and when it is more likely to strengthen democracy. Existing research relies on measures that likely overstate democratic support and overlook how this support can facilitate authoritarian outcomes in certain contexts. By designing new methods to identify how people understand democracy and how people trade democracy off against other political, social, and economic outcomes, DEVAL will develop ground-breaking advances in measuring support for democracy. DEVAL will also advance theoretical and empirical knowledge of the strategies authoritarian leaders use to strengthen their legitimacy by leveraging democratic values. DEVAL will rely on an innovative multi-method approach combining surveys, experiments, interviews, and focus groups to analyze the nature and consequences of support for democracy in ways that are more nuanced and more comprehensive than what exists in current literature. To accomplish this objective, the project will focus on ten countries carefully selected to provide variation in region, development, and regime type. The DEVAL project will provide state-of-the-art advancements to our methods and theories for understanding how people value democracy and how this support may sometimes facilitate authoritarianism. This research will be of significant relevance to debates about how to address the global trend toward autocracy.