Bad Democracy Traps

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Gratton, Gabriele; Lee, Barton E.; Yousaf, Hasin
• 署名单位: University of New South Wales Sydney; Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain; ETH Zurich
• 刊物名称: ECONOMIC JOURNAL
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0013-0133
• DOI: 10.1093/ej/ueaf111
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: Electoral accountability; long-term; POLICY; trust; equilibrium; INFORMATION; origins; VIOLENCE; success; culture

摘要

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.