I’ve been playing with the 2015 EBRD Life in Transition survey dataset for the past few days. I saw an interesting question about political system preferences.

Whereby people were asked to agree most with one of these statements:
* Democracy is preferable to any other form of political system

* Under some circumstances, an authoritarian government may be preferable
to a democratic one

* For people like me, it does not matter whether a government is democratic
or authoritarian

or don’t know

The results were pretty exciting. We have to acknowledge, of course, that many people know that the “right” answer is “democracy!!!!” so there is some social desirability at play here. But nonetheless, the results are telling.

Check out all of those “don’t knows” in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan!