PIs: Scott Mainwaring, Professor, Notre Dame University; Sandra Botero, Associate Professor, Universidad del Rosario; Carlos Gervasoni, Associate Professor, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $10,000, William A. Steiger Fund for Legislative Studies
Project Abstract: We plan to undertake a pioneering survey of Argentine federal deputies’ and senators’ attitudes toward democracy. The survey will allow social scientists, policy analysts, and historians to systematically measure how Argentine members of congress perceive tradeoffs between democracy and other potentially desirable outcomes. These are vital questions in contemporary social science and for the world of democratic practice and policy at a time of democratic backsliding in many countries around the world.
Since the end of the Cold War, the most common path to democratic breakdowns has been incremental processes by which the executive gradually crushes democratic checks and balances and tilts the playing field. Illiberal executives supported by illiberal parties have led all of these executive takeovers. Therefore, understanding variation in how members of congress perceive tradeoffs between democracy and other desirable outcomes is a key question for democracy worldwide.
This project will be the first one to design, pretest, and field an extensive battery of questions to systematically measure politicians’ attitudes toward democracy. We hope that our project will inspire similar efforts in other countries and parts of the world. If parties’ attitudes toward democracy are crucial for understanding when democracy is likely to be under threat, capturing this fact by directly surveying members of congress would be enormously useful. Our project will also generate new knowledge on the methodology of surveying congresses in subject matters prone to high social desirability bias—what we learn about what works and what doesn’t.
