Does Compliance Correlate with Political Support?

Abstract

The literature on state legitimacy posits a close relationship between attitudinal political support and compliant behavior. The relationship is well theorized, but an examination of the empirical evidence suggests a significant lacuna. In the literature that focuses citizens’ attitudinal political sup-port, the relationship has been tested through the use of proxies for behavior. In the literature that focuses states’ actions to coax compliance out of citizens, the relationship is derived from behavior. To begin fill this gap in the research, the paper estimates country-level correlations between standard measures of attitudinal political support and a compliant behavior index generated by us. Using data from comparative survey studies (attitudinal support) and official records (compliant behavior), we find a strong and consistent correlation between the two key variables.