Playing (Un)Fair to Win: A New Measure of (Un)Democratic Attitudes for Survey Research

A major challenge to studying (anti-)democratic attitudes is distinguishing between "survey democrats" and "sincere democrats." While there are robust methods to uncovering implicit, socially undesirable attitudes, they require significant time and resources to administer, especially in surveys. This study is an effort to introduce a low-cost, but robust methodological alternative for researchers to employ in survey design. We do this using a simple battery of questions gauging a person's willingness to cheat and their desire to win in sports. Using dimensional analysis we recover two latent dimensions: fairness and the importance of winning. Regardless of partisanship, we find that these dimensions strongly predict support for a real-world anti-democratic policy.