How Solid is Mass Support for Democracy – And How Can we Measure it?

Ronald Inglehart

Inglehart’s main question is how to measure support for democracy around the world other than the simple survey.

Introduction

Inglehart links culture strongly to a state’s overall support for democracy.  He highlights four main factors which contribute to the success of democracy and uses evidence to show close correlation between these (self-expression values) and democracy.

-          Tolerance of ‘others’ or outgroups.

-          Interpersonal trust.

-          The Post-materialist emphasis on civil rights and political participation

-          A sense of subjective well-being.

Empirical Evidence

The first piece of evidence is Table 1 which Inglehart uses to back up his idea that democracy holds a lot of appeal in the Islamic world, contrary to common belief. In this table many Islamic countries rank relatively high when compared to other countries like New Zealand and the US, with Albania and Egypt actually at the top of the table with 99% support for democracy.

Table 2 illustrates the support for ‘strong leaders who do not have to bother with elections or parliament’ it is partly reflective of unfavourable experiences with democracy, especially new ones, and that although democracy has been almost the only political model with global appeal over the past decade its support is not widespread.

Does Political Culture Matter

Table 3 & Figure 1 show us that a society’s survival/self-expression factor score has a strong correlation to actual levels of democracy within that state.  Stronger than evidence from Table 1 & 2.

Judging by the position of Islamic countries in Table 3 & Figure 1 we can see that although the goal of democracy may be appealing their self-expression values fall short of what is found in ALL established democracies.

What comes first – a Democratic Political Culture or Democratic Institutions

Economic development        higher levels of self-expression values         higher levels of democracy

This was a very interesting article especially the statistics which showed support for democracy in Islamic countries.  Although their self-expression values are different to those living in democratic countries, we have witnessed a significant democratic movement within Arab nations eight years on from this article.  It will also be interesting to see how the ideas from this article tie in with the success of democracy in these countries.