Abstract
In Stealth Democracy, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse seek to show that much of the American public desires “stealth democracy”--a democracy run like a business with little deliberation or public input. The authors maintain that stealth democracy beliefs are largely reasonable preferences, and the public does not want and would react negatively to a more deliberative democracy. This paper introduces an opposing “authoritarian stealth democrats thesis” that suggests that stealth democracy beliefs may be driven by authoritarianism and a variety of related orientations including poor political perspective taking and low cognitive engagement. These orientations may be ameliorated through democratic deliberation. Hypotheses are tested with survey and experimental data from deliberations with a RDD sample of 568 Pittsburgh residents and of 99 Canadian young adults. Using confirmatory factor analysis and OLS regression with cluster-robust standard errors, the paper finds that authoritarianism and related orientations strongly explain stealth democracy beliefs among deliberation participants and that deliberation significantly reduces stealth democracy beliefs and factors behind these beliefs.
Highlights
This paper will examine whether stealth democracy beliefs are grounded in authoritarian and related views and dispositions and whether political deliberation helps to ameliorate stealth democracy beliefs and some of the sources of these beliefs. This paper examines these hypotheses with data from studies of democratic deliberations involving 568 Pittsburgh residents and 99 Canadian young adults selected by random digit dialing
Knowledge Networks (KN) conducted the recruitment for this study, named the Virtual Agora Project or "VAProject." Of a sample of 6,935 Pittsburgh city residents who could be reached via random digit dialing (RDD), 22% agreed to participate in this research and took a phone survey
The authoritarian stealth democrat thesis, which this paper supports, suggests that stealth democracy beliefs are driven by authoritarianism and authoritarianismrelated beliefs that are not basic, unchanging preferences
Summary
ParticipantsKnowledge Networks (KN) conducted the recruitment for this study, named the Virtual Agora Project or "VAProject." Of a sample of 6,935 Pittsburgh city residents (defined by zip code area) who could be reached via random digit dialing (RDD), 22% agreed to participate in this research and took a phone survey. Sampling differed from KN's typical methodology on other deliberation projects in that it did not utilize quota sampling to make demographic statistics more apparently representative of the population as a whole. The sample represents who would come to deliberations without demographic oversampling. There is less need for concern that those oversampled will be atypical for their demographic. Of recruits who agreed to participate, 37% or 568 people showed for the Phase 1 on-campus deliberation. The final participation percentages are not, incomparable to that of many current nationally representative opinion surveys that depend on survey panels, such as those produced by Pew Research. They are similar to that of another substantial long-term https://www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol14/iss2/art
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