Does Process Matter? Direct Democracy and Citizens’ Perceptions of Laws

Ladam, Christina

doi:10.1017/xps.2019.28

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…There is growing evidence that citizens’ support for decision-making procedures such as referenda flips depending on their chance of achieving a favorable outcome (Werner, 2020). Moreover, perceived fairness of democratic procedures for decision-making has either negligible effect on the evaluation of adopted policies (Ladam, 2019) or might be context-specific and pertinent under particular conditions (e.g., government crisis response, see Mazepus & van Leeuwen, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Standing up for Democracy? Explaining Citizens’ Support for Democratic Checks and Balances

Mazepus

Toshkov

2021

Comparative Political Studies

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Winners and losers of elections have different stakes in protecting democratic institutions. We provide new evidence for the effects of partisanship and economic performance on support for checks and balances and acceptance of their infringement. Using survey data from 26 European countries, we show that voters who feel close to a political party that lost the elections support checks and balances significantly more than other citizens. We also find that higher satisfaction with the economy is associated with lower support for checks and balances. Our experiment in Ukraine shows that supporters and opponents of the governing party have divergent evaluations of a reform potentially infringing on the independence of the judiciary. Those in opposition find such reforms less acceptable and justified. Again, we find that improved economic performance leads to higher acceptance of judicial reform. Our results confirm that citizens’ support for checks and balances is contingent and volatile.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Standing up for Democracy? Explaining Citizens’ Support for Democratic Checks and Balances

Mazepus

Toshkov

2021

Comparative Political Studies

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“…If we are concerned with estimating the latent associated traits of attention (such as age, education), it should actually be easier and more informative when our measure of attention comes from an open-rather than closed-ended manipulation check. For example, I brie y checked the percent of respondents that correctly answered factual closed-ended manipulation checks in some recent political science publications and found that it was typically above 90%, which does not really distinguish attention between participants though it likely exists(Edwards and Arnon 2019;Keiser and Miller 2020;Jamieson and Weller 2019;Kim and Kweon 2020;Ladam 2019). If there is very little variation in our measure of attention, as is the case when over 90% of respondents correctly answer a closed-ended manipulation check, socio-demographic variables do not have any variation to explain.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Text-As-Data Approach for Using Open-Ended Responses as Manipulation Checks

Ziegler

2021

Polit. Anal.

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Participants that complete online surveys and experiments may be inattentive, which can hinder researchers’ ability to draw substantive or causal inferences. As such, many practitioners include multiple factual or instructional closed-ended manipulation checks to identify low-attention respondents. However, closed-ended manipulation checks are either correct or incorrect, which allows participants to more easily guess and it reduces the potential variation in attention between respondents. In response to these shortcomings, I develop an automatic and standardized methodology to measure attention that relies on the text that respondents provide in an open-ended manipulation check. There are multiple benefits to this approach. First, it provides a continuous measure of attention, which allows for greater variation between respondents. Second, it reduces the reliance on subjective, paid humans to analyze open-ended responses. Last, I outline how to diagnose the impact of inattentive workers on the overall results, including how to assess the average treatment effect of those respondents that likely received the treatment. I provide easy-to-use software in R to implement these suggestions for open-ended manipulation checks.

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