Democratic values and support for executive power

Abstract

Attempts by elected executives to consolidate power have generated alarm and raised concern about democratic backsliding. In contrast with scholarship on public approval ratings of elected executives, we study the nature of mass attitudes toward the institutional power of the office of the presidency. We investigate the potential for mass publics to constrain antidemocratic behavior and argue that individuals’ democratic values shape views of executive power. Using data from twenty-six countries in the Americas and thirty-seven countries in Africa, we find support for our perspective. Individuals who express stronger commitments to democracy are less supportive of institutional arrangements that favor the executive. Our findings suggest that citizens’ democratic commitments may constrain the ambitions of power-seeking executives and the erosion of democratic practices. their Cronbach’s alpha is .4 indicating that they are not each reliable measuring the same underlying concept. Conducting a principal component analysis yields similar finding. The first dimension explains just 38 percent of the variance with each additional dimension explaining between 18 and 24 percent of the variance. These concepts appear to be measuring somewhat different conceptions of executive power and so we analyze them separately. these country-level sources of variation. Future research could evaluate