Determinants of Democratic Attitudes in Countries with Weak Democracies

Abstract

The explanations on the determinants of democratic attitudes often assume that people have prior experiences with democratic regimes. Haiti has been historically characterized by political, social and economic instability, even after the process of demo­cratic transition that began in 1986 and despite the continuous foreign interventions and humanitarian aid. Based on LAPOP poll results between 2006 and 2017, we test three hypotheses that the evaluation of the regime performance, trust in government institutions and the economic assessment significantly affect the presence of democratic attitudes in three dimensions, preference for a democratic regime, justification of the closing of the legisla­ture by the executive and political tolerance, differently in Haiti than elsewhere in Latin America. With Ordinary Least Square (OLS) models, we find that the determinants of democratic atti­tudes show some particularities for the case of Haiti, but also for other countries in the region.