The Logic of the Novelist: The Causal Mechanism Approach in Public Opinion Research

This paper aims to assess the value of the causal mechanism approach (Hedstrom and Swedberg, 1998; Elster, 1998; Gambetta, 1998) in public opinion research. With this idea in mind, our work explores the types of rationality that underlie choice for political regime, understanding those as causal mechanisms that intervene in the process of preference formation. In doing so, we seek to “clarify, what it might mean in practical terms – i.e., for practicing social scientists – to assume a mechanismic view of causation” (Gerring, 2007:165). The strategy is to test two types of rationality as process derived from supporting democracy at individual level. The analysis focuses on Brazil, a society that recently completed a successful process of transition towards democracy. Our interest is to focus on the balance between the impact of survey respondents‟ evaluations of different dimensions of democratic performance (that we label here as “utilitarian causal mechanism”), and the effects of citizens‟ normative preferences (that we label here as, “normative causal mechanism”), as well as their joint impact on molding individual preferences for a particular type of government in Brazil. The results endorse the hypothesis that utilitarian rationality prevails along some important signs of normative rationality. Finally, we suggest that if public opinion research only considers the utilitarian causal mechanism in preference formation, we would be considering only a portion of the entire portrait. Therefore, an argument in favor of the causal mechanism approach is recommended.