Young people’s happiness, anxiety and sense of political efficacy are related to their preferences for dictatorship and democracy, but not how you might expect
A hot topic this year has been whether young people are more likely to support dictatorship than democracy. Our annual UK Youth Poll added to the evidence that young people are concerned about democracy being in trouble, and want it to do a better job of delivering for them, but that most of them have not abandoned it in favour of dictatorship. The John Smith Centre’s Dr Elisabeth Loose recently unpacked the evidence that young people continue to prefer democracy to dictatorship, arguing that ‘we must acknowledge that the system isn’t working perfectly’ but also ‘show young people why democracy is worth defending.’
In this blog, I will build on the above by looking at some of the other opinions and (self-)perceptions that relate to support for dictatorship amongst young people. Specifically, I am interested in three key elements of how people feel about themselves and their lives: their happiness; their anxiousness; and their sense that they can influence political outcomes. We might expect that people who are unhappy or anxious about their lives under the current democratic system, or think that they have no meaningful voice in it, will be more likely to support another system. I’m going to test those assumptions here.
Starting with people’s levels of happiness, we see that ‘Very happy’ people are the most likely to prefer dictatorship and least likely to prefer democracy. Support for democracy over dictatorship is higher amongst ‘Rather happy,’ ‘Not very happy’ and ‘Not at all happy’ young people. In a similar pattern, the most frequently anxious people (daily) are least likely to prefer dictatorship and most likely to prefer democracy. The preference for dictatorship over democracy increases as frequency of anxiety falls (to weekly and then monthly) but then falls amongst those who rarely or never experience anxiety. Thus, counter to our expectations, it is happier and less frequently anxious young people who are more likely to support dictatorship over democracy.
What about people’s sense of the efficacy of the political system? To get at this, we look at their answers to questions about whether voting can shape the future at the local and national level. Regardless of which level we look at, we see that people who think their vote can make a difference are slightly more likely to support dictatorship. In both cases, 30% of those who see their vote as making a difference prefer dictatorship, whilst around a quarter of those who think their vote does not make a difference prefer dictatorship. This result surprised me: people who think the democratic system is open to being influenced by their vote are nonetheless more likely to support dictatorship.
There is a problem with the above analysis though: it might be that traits like happiness, anxiety, and sense of political efficacy are associated with demographic traits such as age, gender and education. Those demographic traits could also be shaping preferences for dictatorship or democracy, but the above results don’t take that into account. It is worth considering an example here. If women are more likely than men to report being frequently anxious (our data shows that this is the case) and are more likely to prefer democracy to dictatorship (again, our data shows this), then just looking at anxiety ignores the effect of gender. In other words, it might be gender that shapes both anxiety and preferences for dictatorship, meaning those two things are correlated with each other because of their relationships with gender. So, we need a way to take key demographic traits into account when looking at the relationships between things like anxiety and support for dictatorship.
To do this, I ran regression models including people’s demographic characteristics alongside happiness, anxiety, and efficacy.[1] I then produced graphs that show the estimated probability of choosing dictatorship over democracy (or ‘Don’t know’) at each level of the other things we’re interested in. Starting with happiness, we see that happier people are more likely than their unhappier counterparts to prefer dictatorship to democracy, even when taking into account their demographic characteristics. When we turn to frequency of feeling anxious, we see that those in the middling categories (‘Weekly’ and ‘Monthly’) are the most likely to prefer dictatorship to democracy. Finally, whilst support for dictatorship does not vary a great deal by views of the efficacy of voting at the local level, people who agree that voting can shape the UK at the national level are more likely than their counterparts who disagree to support dictatorship over democracy. [2]
So, the differences in support for dictatorship by happiness, anxiety and efficacy persist even when we account for demographic characteristics. Young people who are happier, who are in the middle categories of anxiousness, and who believe in the efficacy of voting in national elections are the most likely to prefer dictatorship over democracy. What might explain these results? To take an educated guess, it could be to do with having a sense of being OK. In other words, if you are happy, not too anxious, and think that you have a voice in decisions, you might have a sense that things will generally be alright and therefore be less worried about the prospect of a dictatorship. Psychological security, perhaps stemming from material circumstances, can insure people against the (perceived) threat of dictatorship, allowing them to feel that they will be OK even in such circumstances. In relation to voting efficacy, we might also be seeing a ‘critical friend’ effect. In other words, people who think that their vote makes little difference might be critics of UK democracy on the grounds that it is not democratic enough. Those people are sceptical of their voice in a flawed democratic system but are also likely to be staunchly opposed to dictatorship, explaining the link between low voter efficacy and a preference for democracy to dictatorship. Of course, it is worth restating that across all the groups considered here, there are considerably more people who prefer democracy to dictatorship. Nonetheless, there are sizeable minorities who prefer dictatorship to democracy. The fact that these minorities are larger amongst happier people with middling levels of anxiety, and who think that voting can make a difference, remains surprising and worthy of further investigation.
[2] Differences between categories of happiness, anxiety and national vote efficacy are statistically significant at 95% level, meaning that we are confident that they are likely to reflect differences in the population, and that we did not happen to randomly gain a sample of young people with differences that do not reflect those in the wider population.
