Emancipative Values, Development, and Democracy: Regime Legitimacy and Economic Voting Trends Across Nations

Few research studies have examined the effect of emancipative values on economic voting in anocric countries, those that are neither democratic nor dictatorial. In this study, I operationalize emancipative values and economic voting across countries around the world and estimate a model of economic voting in a pooled annual time series data set. Evidence from the World Values Surveys indicates a large variation in emancipative values exists between nation-states. Where they are weak, people prefer strong leadership over political freedoms, often for the sake of political or economic stability. Weak emancipative values privilege political decisions in favor of economic performance, rather than freedoms. This may lead to a rise in economic voting. Thus, I hypothesize that, controlling for other factors, anocric countries will display greater evidence of economic voting than will democracies due to weak emancipative values. The ability of an electorate to evaluate governmental economic policy at the polls holds interesting implications for government accountability