Bad Democracy Traps

Abstract We study how political culture interacts with a democracy’s ability to pursue ambitious policy agendas. We conceptualise a political culture as voters’ possibly misspecified beliefs about the quality of their democracy’s political class and institutions. Within a standard model of political agency, political culture drives both voters’ and politicians’ choices. In a cultural equilibrium, reality constrains culture to be consistent with long-term observations of political and economic outcomes. Negative cultures can trap democracy and positive cultures allow democracy to outperform with respect to its true qualities. We confirm the empirical relevance of our selection mechanism in an online survey experiment.