Séminaire "invité" : Edward P. Freeland et Adam Berinsky

Séance exceptionnelle du séminaire Gouvernance avec deux invités internationaux (en anglais).

“Mind the Gap: Measuring the Ideal and Perceived Features of Democracy as a Method for Validating Satisfaction with Democracy” 

Satisfaction with Democracy (SWD) is one of the most popular survey questions in political science. The question, which asks how well or poorly respondents believe democracy is working in their country, has appeared in hundreds of surveys, including the American National Election Survey, the General Social Survey, and European Social Survey (ESS). Yet despite its wide usage, SWD has been criticized for ambiguity, weak content validity, limited cross-national comparability, and low reliability due to mode and question ordering effects. Recent data from the European Social Survey now make it possible to address these criticisms. Round 6 and Round 10 of the ESS include a battery of new survey items asking respondents about the importance of various democratic institutions and practices in an ideal or abstract sense and also about how well each of those same institutions and practices function in the respondent’s home country. This approach does more than bore into people’s understanding of the constituent components of democracy: it also creates measurable gaps between the ideal conception of those components and their perceived functioning. An analysis of these gaps reveals citizen preferences in terms of both the ideal and performative aspects of democracy in Europe. It also provides a new and unique way to validate the SWD survey question. We find that for both Europe as a whole and for most European countries, SWD increases in a clear, monotonic fashion as the measured gaps between the ideal and the perceived features of democracy decrease.

Edward P. Freeland is Executive Director at SRC Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

“Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It”

I describe how misinformation can take hold in the public mind - and why it is so difficult to correct falsehoods. I discuss the psychological foundations of false beliefs and describe why a simple presentation of facts is not sufficient to convince citizens to reject statements that have little foundation in the truth. I then describe the communication strategies that can be most effectively employed to discredit false information - and the ones that will likely fail.

Adam Berinsky is Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology