This study examines how Americans conceptualize democracy and whether their support for democratic principles remains consistent across different trade-offs. Using a conjoint experiment, we test whether citizens act as principle holders—maintaining support for democratic norms regardless of circumstances—or benefit seekers who prioritize material outcomes over liberal democratic norms. Our findings reveal that while respondents generally prefer democratic principles including rule of law, political equality, and freedom of expression, these preferences are moderated by economic well-being. When presented with scenarios featuring economic disadvantage, support for traditional democratic principles declines markedly. This context dependency challenges conventional survey measures of democratic attitudes, as we observe substantial divergence between participants’ self-reported understandings of democracy and their revealed preferences when forced to navigate trade-offs. These results help to explain why campaign appeals framing democracy as “on the ballot” proved ineffective in the 2024 US presidential election, as voters facing economic hardship privileged material concerns over abstract democratic principles. Our findings contribute to debates about democratic backsliding by demonstrating that economic conditions play a crucial role in shaping citizens’ commitment to democratic governance, with implications for understanding populist mobilization and the resilience of democratic norms during periods of economic uncertainty.

We provide a generalized revealed preference test for quasilinear preferences. The test applies to nonlinear budget sets and non-convex preferences as those found in taxation and nonlinear pricing contexts. We study the prevalence of quasilinear preferences in a laboratory real-effort task experiment with nonlinear wages. The experiment demonstrates the empirical relevance of our test. We find support for either convex (non-separable) preferences or quasilinear preferences but weak support for the hypothesis of both quasilinear and convex preferences.

Many studies have investigated the role of socio-demographic factors (including gender, age, race), cognitive ability and cultural factors on time and risk preferences. Yet, research regarding the effect of mindfulness on risk and time preferences has been limited. This study investigates the association between mindfulness and time/risk preferences. We conducted a survey on a representative sample of the French adult population (N = 1154) in Spring 2020. We assessed individual mindfulness through the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS), and measured time and risk preferences with incentive-compatible economic games as well as self-reported questionnaires. Our results suggest that a higher level of mindfulness is associated with higher risk aversion and patience for stated preferences, but we found no relationship for revealed ones. We also observe that a higher level of mindfulness is related to greater time consistency, as we found a negative and significant association between the MAAS and the present and future biases.

Revealed preference approaches to modelling agents’ choices face two seemingly devastating explanatory objections. The no self-explanation objection imputes a problematic explanatory circularity to revealed preference approaches, while the causal explanation objection argues that, all things equal, a scientific theory should provide causal explanations, but revealed preference approaches decidedly do not. Both objections assume a view of explanation, the constraint-based view, that the revealed preference theorist ought to reject. Instead, the revealed preference theorist should adopt a unificationist account of explanation, allowing her to escape the two explanatory problems discussed in this paper.