When asked “How important is it for you to live in a country that is governed democratically?” the level of importance dropped from 8.7 in 2006 to 8.3 in 2017 for the average American (on a 10-point scale). The goal of our project is to compare these numbers with those of other large democracies across the globe and to test the hypothesis that there is an inverse correlation between changes in such commitment to democracy and changes regarding people’s expressed affiliation with extreme political views on the right and the left. Since the World Values Survey (WVS) asked these two questions in its Waves 5, 6, and 7, there is a unique opportunity to study the answers.

A presentation in the Workshop for Original Policy Research (WOPR) by Michael Hoffmann, Kaitlyn Banh, and Nicholas Wilson