By Lucio Muñoz: Independent Qualitative Comparative Researcher / Consultant, Vancouver, BC, Canada Email: munoz@interchange.ubc.ca
Abstract
The coming of extreme democratic outcomes in 2016 like BREXIT and USEXIT has increased interest recently in understanding: a) how they come to be as they are usually the unexpected democratic outcomes of the moment, which explains the after the fact widespread discontent and surprise when people realize that the unexpected has actually happened; and b) why they do not fall under normal polling predictions or analysis.
At the heart of specific democratic outcomes is complacency, the protest behavior that has the power to determine if there will be a normal democratic outcome or an extreme democratic outcome at the end of a democratic process. Yet not much is known or written to my knowledge about the role of complacency in determining democratic outcomes in a true democracy or about democratic outcome expectations. Among the goals of this paper is to link voting outcome expectations to a complacency variability model using qualitative comparative means.
