Measuring the Emperor's Clothes: Estimating Latent Opposition to Authoritarian Regimes with Randomized Response Questions
Year: 2025

While many studies of public opinion in authoritarian regimes rely on list experiments to overcome sensitivity bias, we show in this paper that a different technique, the crosswise variant of the randomized response design, has superior performance at measuring latent opposition to authoritarian regimes with fewer assumptions. To show the power of this design, we randomly assigned a panel of 924 Tunisian survey respondents to receive either a direct question about support for Tunisian President