Amid all the uncertainty and bad news lately, I ended the year on a positive note when some good news about my research came in. In academia, good news usually means one thing: more research funding — and that’s exactly what happened. Thanks to this, I’ll be able to run two new survey experiments in Estonia and Latvia, and I’ll spend some time in Riga for fieldwork in June.
The new surveys will follow a similar setup to one I ran last year, which means I can directly compare the results. So what did that earlier study look like? Half of the participants read a news article similar to the kind of content often shared by Russia’s state media. The other half didn’t read anything at all. Everyone then answered questions about their views on political parties and their agreement with authoritarian statements like: Having a strong leader in government is good for my country, even if the leader bends the rules to get things done.
Going into the study, I expected that people who read the article would be more supportive of authoritarian ideas. But the results surprised me. Instead of becoming more sympathetic, these participants were actually more critical of the authoritarian statements.
One way to make sense of this is through the idea of motivated reasoning. Put simply, people tend to interpret new information in ways that fit with what they already believe. Rather than changing their minds when confronted with opposing views, they often double down on their existing opinions. In this case, people who were already satisfied with how democracy works in Estonia became even more opposed to authoritarian ideas after reading the article.
The new survey experiments are meant to see whether this pattern holds up. If I find similar results a year later — and not just in Estonia but also in Latvia — that would give much more confidence that this effect is real and not a one-off finding.
Over the next few months, I’ll be working on the survey design and planning my fieldwork in Latvia. More updates soon. 🙂