Democracy’s defenders are fighting with a broken thermometer. DEVAL will build new tools to measure whether people truly support democracy—or just say they do—and how authoritarian leaders exploit that support to stay in power. Existing surveys almost certainly overstate democratic commitment. People tell pollsters they value democracy, then vote for leaders who dismantle it. DEVAL will design experiments and interviews that reveal how citizens actually trade democracy off against security, prosperity, or national pride. The project will study ten countries across different regions and regime types, capturing variation that single-country studies miss. If DEVAL succeeds, it will give policymakers and civil society groups a reliable way to spot when democratic support is genuine and when it is shallow enough for authoritarians to weaponise. This matters for international development agencies, election monitors, and democracy-promotion programmes that currently rely on misleading data. The research is fundamental social science—it will not produce a policy manual—but better measurement could reshape how governments and NGOs decide where to invest in democratic resilience, and how to recognise an autocratic takeover before it is complete.
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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.
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