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This event is hybrid, to attend remotely register here.
This project examines citizens' commitment to democracy and their role in monitoring politicians' undemocratic behavior.
The most commonly used measures of support for democracy come from public opinion surveys, based on questions that may suffer from social desirability bias and overlook the trade-offs that citizens face when choosing candidates. We scrutinize stated commitment to democracy, as measured by both explicit survey responses and implicit choice experiments, and compare it to revealed patterns of democratic commitment.
We use panel surveys from Colombia and Peru in 2022, and a third wave in Peru following a significant undemocratic move by former President Castillo. We find low implicit democratic commitment, even among those who explicitly endorse democracy. We also characterize a discernible democracy-ideology trade-off that influences voting choices. Moreover, we find that citizens interpret real-world undemocratic events through a partisan lens and consequently reshape their own democratic attitudes to align with their political leanings.
Overall, our study underscores the limited efficacy of citizens as effective checks on democracy, especially in polarized democratic environments, and highlights the complexity of balancing democratic principles with ideological leanings.
This is coauthored with Hernán Carvajal (Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia) and Loreto Cox (Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile).
Speaker: Natalia Garbiras-Díaz, Assistant Professor of Business Administration; Harvard Business School; Harvard University
Moderated by Alisha Holland, Professor of Government, Harvard University.
Natalia Garbiras-Díaz received her Ph.D. in Political Science in 2021 from the University of California, Berkeley, where she is currently a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development. Prior to joining Harvard Business School, she was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Italy. Her primary research interests are in comparative politics and the political economy of development, with a focus on corruption, public goods provision, and accountability in Latin America. She also studies the formation of citizens' and ex-combatants' attitudes towards peace agreements and their role in stabilizing peace in post-conflict settings. She holds an M.A. in Economics from the University of Los Andes (Colombia). Prior to her Ph.D., she worked at the World Bank, the Democracy Observatory, and the Colombian National Planning Department.
Alisha Holland is a Professor in the Government Department at Harvard University. Before joining the Harvard faculty, she was an Assistant Professor in the Politics Department at Princeton University. Her first book, Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics), looks at the politics of enforcement against property law violations by the poor, such as squatting, street vending, and electricity theft. She is working on a new book on the politics of mass infrastructure investments in Latin America.
Presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs