An incomplete recipe: One-dimensional latent variables do not capture the full flavor of democratic support

Prominent recent works have measured democratic support using a single latent variable that purports to span a single dimension from steadfast opposition to whole-hearted support. This ignores ample evidence that support for democracy is complex and multidimensional. Here we provide a series of validation tests of the sort of cross-national time-series latent variable measures employed in recent research by reference to questions on support for liberal democracy and opposition to its erosion from multi-wave surveys conducted around the world. These tests show that, across countries and years, this latent variable is nearly orthogonal to measures of support for contestation and participation; civil liberties; institutional constraints on executive power; and prioritizing democracy over the economy, economic equality, or order. We conclude that support for democracy in any robust sense is simply not well captured by one-dimensional latent variable. Such measures are powerful but researchers must be mindful of their limitations.