About Chad Kiewiet de Jonge

Chad P. Kiewiet de Jonge is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Notre Dame with a primary focus on comparative politics. Additional research and training has emphasized survey research, Latin American politics, and American politics.

His dissertation explains why support for democracy is higher in some countries and lower in others and why some people support democracy while others do not. Building on existing theoretical perspectives on democratic attitudes and leading theories of political learning, the dissertation argues that both values socialization and performance evaluations play a role, but that their effects accumulate over the entire lifetime. Specifically, democratic support is the product of a weighted average of political contexts experienced by individuals and the subgroups in which they are members. The degree to which political contexts provide pro-democratic information is a function of regime economic and political performance, coups and transitions to democracy, economic modernization, and other factors in the literature. The weight of such contexts is related to both the age at which individuals experience them, as well as their level of political sophistication. In contrast to leading theoretical perspectives, the theory emphasizes the importance of learning over the entire lifetime. The theoretical framework helps to explain not only why some countries demonstrate stronger support for democracy in the aggregate, but also why individuals within the same country sometimes have strongly divergent views about regimes. The dissertation uses survey data from Spain, Latin America, and Eastern Europe to test the efficacy of the proposed theoretical framework.

Chad’s other research interests include clientelism, democratization, quality of democracy, political behavior, political memory, collective action and survey methodology.  He is currently involved in a large collaborative survey-based project focused on vote buying in Latin America as well as related survey methodological research. His current research, including published works, conference papers, and working papers are listed on the research page.

Chad’s professional experience has included providing research and management assistance for the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project; serving as the assistant editor of APSA-CP, the professional newsletter published for the Organized Section in Comparative Politics of the American Political Science Association; working as a graduate research assistant in the Economics, Labor, and Population Studies Dept. at NORC at the University of Chicago; assisting in research for and the management of research projects related to democracy; and providing teaching assistance for introductory courses in comparative politics and international relations at the University of Notre Dame.