The advent of nearly global estimates of democratic mood has caused genuine optimism for comparative investigations into the linkages between public opinion and democracy. Scholarly enthusiasm in this field has particularly been boosted by recent claims that measuring latent democratic support with hierarchical IRT models overcomes differential item functioning (DIF)-a well-known challenge that typically foils the comparability of latent constructs across time and space. Focusing specifically on DIF-induced violations to scalar measurement invariance, we show mathematically and with statistical simulations that no commonly used latent variable modeling framework, including hierarchical IRT, is immune to bias stemming from systematic DIF. While some models can fully accommodate measurement invariance violations that are completely random between nations and across items, they begin to falter as soon as such violations exhibit a directional bias, that is, if respondents from different countries interpret or appraise survey items systematically differently. Equipped with democratic mood data from Latin America, we present suggestive evidence that systematic, directional bias in DIF is far more prevalent than random measurement noninvariance. We conclude with a number of practical recommendations for public opinion researchers to mitigate measurement invariance violations in their own work.

What drives popular support for political executives? Compared to normal times, we know little about how the public responds to executives in extraordinary circumstances, and we know even less about similarities and differences across crisis events. While a calculating public may sanction incumbents for adverse events, the unexpected nature of many crises has the potential to increase leaders’ approval ratings. Based on time series analyses of executive approval from 35 countries across 25 years and drawing on an original Crisis Events Dataset, we show that the strength of rallies corresponds to crises’ degree of plausible exogeneity and to whether their resolution requires concentrated action by the government. Crises in three domains – security, the environment, and public health – tend to produce rallies rather than reprimands, while economic shocks yield no direct effect on approval. Lastly, we find that institutional features are less important in predicting approval during crises than they are in normal times. By demonstrating crises’ potential to upend the mechanisms of political accountability, our findings lay a foundation for further inquiry into how political context matters for public opinion in extraordinary times.

Why do citizens support negotiated solutions to internal conflicts? We develop a theoretical framework drawing insights from prosocial generalized trust orientations and classic models of public opinion. We expect generalized trust-a baseline belief in the trustworthiness of others as members of a shared moral community-to be positively associated with support for negotiated peace. Original survey and behavioral data collected during the peace talks between the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and survey data following the Guatemalan peace agreement are consistent with this hypothesis. Standard public opinion models suggest that this association should strengthen as negotiated peace grows in salience, a hypothesis compatible with rolling cross-sectional survey analyses and placebo tests surrounding Colombia's 2016 peace referendum. By linking prosocial generalized trusting dispositions to attitudes toward negotiated peace outcomes, our findings advance our knowledge of the microfoundations of international relations and conflict resolution.

While research shows that public preferences across policy domains tend to move in parallel, the mechanisms behind this dynamic remain unclear. We examine four explanations: (1) alignment in preferred policy levels; (2) parallel policy movement combined with domain-specific thermostatic feedback; (3) feedback to global policy across domains; and (4) responsiveness to presidential partisanship. These mechanisms matter for how we interpret public opinion change and policy responsiveness. We develop and test a theoretical model using data on four social spending domains in the USA. Our findings suggest that spending mood reflects both parallelism in preferred policy levels and responsiveness to overall social spending and presidential party affiliation.

The advent of nearly global estimates of democratic mood represents a genuine cause for optimism about identifying the linkages between the dynamics of public opinion and democracy. Yet the validity of extant measures of democratic mood rest on assumptions of dimensionality and measurement equivalence that largely remain untested. This study assesses the assumptions of uni-dimensionality and metric and scalar invariance using indicators of democratic mood in high-quality multinational samples from the Americas. Results suggest that democratic mood is plausibly uni-dimensional in only 1-3 out of 14 countries for which this assumption can be comprehensively tested. Metric invariance is a reasonable assumption in 10 of 22 cases 2004-2012 for which data permit testing, but scalar invariance holds only in 2 among these. Monte Carlo simulations, however, show that downstream consequences of violating dimensionality and measurement equivalence assumptions are not always highly deleterious in terms of statistical bias and uncertainty. We discuss these results with respect to content validity of latent democratic mood and our ability to compare levels and changes of mood across space and time.

Debates on the nature and causes of populism persist in the public and among academics. We test two contemporary theories of populism – issue-based and ideational – by exploring their implications for the expression of populist rhetoric among citizens. In a large scale, cross-national experiment (N ~ 18,000), we prompt the expression of populism through an elaboration task exploring the causes and solutions to current policy problems. The task frames the discussion as the product of either responsible actors (populist framing) or impersonal circumstances (non-populist framing). Three findings emerge: (1) different political issues provoke more populism than others; (2) framing policy problems in terms of responsible actors increases the expression of populism across countries and participants; and (3) political issues combine with respondents’ ideology to prompt populism in predictable ways. These findings support the arguments of the ideational approach.

Does the type of democratic regime matter for public evaluations of leaders? We argue two characteristics intrinsic to presidential and parliamentary regimes lead to divergent patterns of executive approval. For presidents, direct elections foster more personal leader-voter linkages; for prime ministers, dependence on the legislature for survival contributes to more institutionalized party systems. These two mechanisms should generate higher approval at the outset of a term-larger honeymoons- for presidents than for prime ministers, but also more rapid decline. Analyses of data from 40 countries produce evidence consistent with these constitutionally-based distinctions. Yet we uncover important within-regime differences. Within presidential systems, approval patterns vary along with paths to power-first-election versus re-election, and elected versus unelected. Within parliamentarism, honeymoons are greater for prime ministers overseeing single-party majoritarian governments. Study findings advance long-standing debates about the relative merits of presidential and parliamentary systems-particularly the tradeoff between democratic responsiveness and stability.

Much of what we know about public support for democracy is based on survey questions about “democracy,” a term that varies in meaning across countries and likely prompts uncritically supportive responses. This paper proposes a new approach to measuring support for democracy. We develop a battery of 17 survey questions that cover all eight components of liberal democracy as defined by the V-Dem project. We then ask respondents from 19 national samples to evaluate these rights and institutions. We find considerable heterogeneity across countries in how our items cohere, especially in less developed contexts. Yet, those items that are more weakly connected with general support for liberal democracy tend to reveal the influence of political events and actors, arguably indicating weaknesses in political cultures. We further identify a concise subset of seven items that provide a reliable and valid measure of support for liberal democracy across our different samples.

We advance a theory of pigmentocratic executive approval that accounts for both skin color-based group attachments and deviations in skin tone between citizens and leaders. We argue that such deviations will decrease approval most strongly for those lighter in complexion than the incumbent. We further argue that individuals will most strongly punish incumbents for poor economic performance when their skin tone is lighter than the executive's. To test our theory, we assess the skin tone of dozens of leaders from the Americas, and we couple the resulting measure with mass survey data from the leaders' countries. Our findings demonstrate that executive approval throughout the Americas replicates patterns of "pigmentocracy"-inequalities and hierarchies that privilege lighter skin tones.

Despite governors' crucial roles in shaping important policies, including abortion, education, and infrastructure, forecasters have paid little attention to gubernatorial elections. We posit that institutional idiosyncrasies and lack of public opinion data have exacerbated the classic problem facing all election forecasts: there are too many predictors and too few cases, leading to overfitting. To address these problems, we combine new governor and state-level presidential approval data with a machine-learning approach, LASSO, for variable selection. LASSO examines numerous variables but retains only those that substantively improve model performance. Results demonstrate the efficacy of gubernatorial and presidential approval ratings measured two quarters preelection in predicting both incumbent-party vote share and election winners in out-of-sample predictions. For 2022, our approach outperformed the Cook Political Report's Partisan Voting Index and compared well with 538's Election Day prediction. For 2024, our LASSO-Popularity model predictions indicate that it will likely be a difficult year for Democrats in gubernatorial contests.

How do democratic attitudes map onto politic-economic context? We examine this question with a decade’s worth of high-quality data on public opinion and democratic quality in Brazil. From this empirical foundation, we analyze the observable implications of four theoretical perspectives – democratic culture, performance-based instrumentality, winners’ consent, and thermostatic dynamics. Our results suggest that during the periods of economic boom and bust, instrumental performance-based perspectives appear moste valid. But during the recent era of democratic backsliding, the evidence is more compatible with two models: one in which supporters of the incumbent tolerate the erosion of civil liberties and political rights, and another model that predicts an attitudinal backlash against falling levels of democracy during the final years of the Bolsonaro government. These conclusions are tentative. More data is required to substantiate them and more rigorously test their empirical expectations.

Abstract Understanding the dynamics of the public’s response to the economy requires time-series measures. Collecting data over sufficient time periods and across varied national contexts, however, presents several conceptual and practical challenges. This chapter discusses how the Executive Approval Database addresses these challenges. The authors compare approval ratings to other commonly used indicators of popular support for leaders, such as trust, vote intentions, and past vote shares. They then describe how the Executive Approval Project generates estimates of approval ratings for presidents, prime ministers, and governments. They identify and address conceptual, methodological, and measurement problems and explain how these address issues of reliability and validity. The chapter closes by discussing the properties of the dataset and the specific countries examined in this volume.

Attempting to buy votes is, in some cases, inefficient and damaging to a clientelistic party. To explain why, we propose the concept of electoral retaliation: sanctioning clientelistic parties by voting against them or intentionally invalidating the ballot. These forms of negative reciprocity are meant to uphold the democratic norms-equal participation, popular sovereignty, electoral fairness-that vote buying undermines. Electoral retaliation is, we theorize, the domain of "democrats." Thus, we expect voters who highly value democratic norms to be most likely to retaliate against vote-buying parties. We test our theory's observable implications with a research design that pairs case study and subnational evidence from Argentina with cross-national evidence from Latin America. Results are consistent with the notion that when clientelistic parties target democrats, it is likely to backfire on the machine. Our analyses examine multiple indicators of democratic support, explore causal mechanisms, conduct placebo tests, and seek to rule out various forms of selection bias.

How do stances on public policies aimed at ethnic conflict resolution affect intergroup trust? Building on theories of prosociality, social identity, and intergroup bias, we expect redistributive policy preferences meant to resolve ethnic conflict to replace ethnicity as the main barrier to intergroup trust because their zero‐sum nature raises intergroup threat. We test our expectations in Chile's ongoing indigenous/nonindigenous conflict using behavioral trust games embedded in an online nationally representative quota survey ( n = 1105). Results align with our expectation. Namely, a lack of shared ethnic identity between nonindigenous Chileans and indigenous Mapuche does not lower intergroup trust. However, shared stances on a policy that would raise taxes to spur development in indigenous communities do increase intergroup trust discrimination. We probe the psychological mechanism—meaningful policy‐based group identities—by testing whether trustor indigenous identification and trustor political ideology moderate the effect of trustee policy stances on intergroup trust. Results are consistent with our assumption that shared policy stances can, indeed, form the basis of a meaningful social identity. Hence the very policies meant to end intergroup conflict could potentially perpetuate or redirect it to institutional channels of representation.

Constitutions empower people to ask judges for binding orders directing state agents to remedy rights violations, but state agents do not always comply. Scholars propose that by making it easier to observe noncompliance, courts can leverage public pressure for compliance when it exists. Yet, exposure to information about noncompliance might lead individuals to accept high levels of noncompliance and reduce support for judicial remedies. We estimate the rate of noncompliance with judges’ orders via a rigorous tracking study of the Colombiantutela.We then embed this rate in three survey experiments fielded with online national quota samples. We show that people find the noncompliance rate in thetutelahighly unacceptable regardless of a variety of mitigating factors. We also show that public reactions to this information depend on prior expectations, a finding that stresses the importance of scholarship in cognitive psychology for studies of compliance in law and politics.

A robust economy is assumed to bolster leaders' standing. This ignores how benefits of growth are distributed. Extending the partisan models of economic voting, we theorize executives are more likely rewarded when gains from growth go to their constituents. Analyses of presidential approval in 18 Latin American countries support our pro-constituency model of accountability. When economic inequality is high, growth concentrates among the rich, and approval of right-of-center presidents is higher. Leftist presidents benefit from growth when gains are more equally distributed. Further analyses show growth and inequality inform perceptions of personal finances differently based on wealth, providing a micro-mechanism behind the aggregate findings. Study results imply that the economy is not purely a valence issue, but also a position issue.

The surprising results of the 2018 presidential elections in Brazil revealed citizens' dissatisfaction with the previous government. The emergence of Jair Bolsonaro as a conservative candidate and his supporters' growth reveals a more profound political crisis in Brazil. As the feeling of not being represented increases among citizens, political outsiders see as an opportunity to take the stage. These actors often emerge in periods of crisis claiming to fight for "the people" against "the enemies" – the responsible for the crisis. In the past years, Brazil has experienced high levels of political dissatisfaction among citizens due to corruption scandals which led to the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016. Using voters' responses to the 2018-CESOP survey, this study analyzes the linkage between the crisis of representation and voting for Bolsonaro. The findings reveal a strong relationship between the government's lack of trust and high corruption perception of Jair Bolsonaro electorate.