(Successful) Democracies Breed Their Own Support
Using large-scale survey data covering more than 110 countries and exploiting within-country variation across cohorts and surveys, we show that individuals with longer exposure to democracy display stronger support for democratic institutions. We bolster these baseline findings using an instrumental-variables strategy exploiting regional democratization waves and focusing on immigrants’ exposure to democracy before migration. In all cases, the timing and nature of the effects are consistent with a causal interpretation. We also establish that democracies breed their own support only when they are successful: all of the effects we estimate work through exposure to democracies that are successful in providing economic growth, peace and political stability, and public goods.
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Copy CitationDaron Acemoglu, Nicolás Ajzenman, Cevat Giray Aksoy, Martin Fiszbein, and Carlos A. Molina, "(Successful) Democracies Breed Their Own Support," NBER Working Paper 29167 (2021), https://doi.org/10.3386/w29167.