How Solid is Mass
Support for Democracy—And How Can We Measure It?
This article by Ronald Inglehart, published
in 2003, outlines a social scientific study which examines the support for
democracy. The study examines how strong support for democracy is in a variety
of societies to see whether there is a link between the support of democracy
and the level of democracy in a society. While other research programmes have mainly
focused on overt support for democracy, this study also examines other factors
which could play a role in democracy. Interpersonal trust, tolerance of
outgroups, post-materialist emphasis on civil rights and political
participation and well-being are used as societal factors due to their apparent
links in political literature to democratic support. Interpersonal trust is
important because democratic institutions rely on trust that everyone will play
by the rules of democracy. Tolerance of outgroups is also important because in
order to have a legitimate opposition, tolerance between groups who disagree
and dislike each other is necessary. Post-materialist values are deemed important
since they emphasise freedom of speech and participation (I have linked the Wikipedia
page if you want to know more about what post-materialism is). Well-being is
also used as it is linked to economic success which seems to legitimise
democratic institutions. By this notion however, economic success could
legitimise authoritarian regimes the same way. The study took data from the World
Values Survey/European Values Survey, which provides data 77 societies ranging
from authoritarian regimes to democracies, and linked the data to a society’s
level of democracy as measured by freedom house.
The study found that overt support of democracy
is widespread across many different regime types, but that it is not an
accurate predictor of the level of democracy in a given society. Instead, the
study found that higher levels of tolerance, interpersonal trust, political
activism and post-materialist values were a more accurate predictor of
democracy. Inglehart labels these values as “self-expression values”. Societies
that rank high on one of these factors tend to rank high on all four, whereas
societies that rank low on one tend to rank low on all four. Societies that
rank low are considered to have “Survival values”. Survival vs self-expression
is linked with economic well-being: as a society’s economy develops, the
society shifts from survival values to self-expression values. Inglehart argues
that this explains the link between economic development and democracy – while economic
development does not bring about democracy by itself, it brings a rising level
of values that lead to growing demands for democratisation.
The first table shows the results for the
percentage of those surveyed from each country who think that a democratic
system is “very good” or “fairly good”. The results show that most people in
the world support democracy, even in authoritarian societies. Albania and Egypt
were the top ranked countries with 99% of those interviewed supporting
democracies. The table highlights Islamic countries in bold, and with the
exception of Pakistan which scores low at 68%, they score highly. Going from these
results, it seems as though democracy is appealing to these societies, contrary
to popular belief. Overall the results show that the image of democracy
throughout the world is overwhelmingly positive. The median country scored 92%.
The second table shows the results for the
percentage of those interviewed from each country who think that rule by a
strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections would
be “very good” or “good”. These results show that support for democracy is in
fact not as widespread as the results for table 1 suggest. In 18 societies a
majority of people support the idea of an authoritarian leader.
From the democracy/autocracy index, we can
see that countries that rank high on support for democracy and high on the
rejection of authoritarianism tend to be stable democracies. This is shown by
the 0.506 correlation. The survival/self-expression values are an even stronger
predictor of stable democracy. The five values measured by the questions were
trust, well-being, tolerance, political activism and post-materialism. The
results show a strong correlation between the survival/self-expression factor
scores and stable democracy.
Based on the results, the survival vs
self-expression values score is a stronger explanatory variable for stable
democracy than overt support for democracy. Figure 1 shows the relationship
between scores on the survival/self-expression dimension and the level of
democracy in the given country between 1981 and 2000. It shows that out of 76
countries, most country’s level of democracy links with their survival/self-expression
scores. China, Iran and Vietnam are notable outliers which have a lower level
of democracy than their societies’ values would predict, and Hungary shows a
higher level of democracy than their society’s values would predict.
Based on the findings, Inglehart assumes that
economic development brings about higher levels of self-expression values which
in turn leads to higher levels of democracy, although this study does not explicitly
demonstrate this. This assumption concludes that culture seems to shape
democracy more than democracy shapes culture, although Inglehart admits that
arguments can be made against this and that further research is needed.
It is not clear how many people were
interviewed in each country, and it is not clear whether the people interviewed
were an accurate representation of their society as a whole. This leads me to question
how accurate the results are. Furthermore, the conclusion that the survival/self-expression
factor scores are a more accurate predictor of long-term democratic stability
is based off the answers to only five questions. These questions are not necessarily
a good predictor of the given value in a society. For example, tolerance was
found to have the highest correlation with long-term democratic stability out
of the five values with a correlation of 0.804. This was based on a question
which asks whether homosexuality is justified. I would argue that tolerance for
homosexuals does not necessarily mean tolerance in a society is high for other
groups e.g. political opponents or religious minorities. Inglehart uses tolerance
towards homosexuality as the test since he argued that homosexuals constitute
the most disliked group in most societies. I would argue that this is not accurate
enough to determine a society’s overall level of tolerance. More questions
would be required to get an aggregate score for tolerance. The other values
also were measured with just one question, which raises suspicions that they
too are also not accurate representations of society’s actual values. I think
more studies would need to be done with multiple questions for each value in
order to achieve an accurate study.
Keep in mind that this study was published
in 2003. The data was taken from the 1980s and 1990s. It would be interesting
to see how the results would compare if the study was repeated today. I would
assume that the findings would be similar, but new democracies have emerged and
existing democracies have declined towards authoritarianism since the turn of
the century which could produce interesting findings.
Source:
Inglegart, R. (2003). How solid is mass
support for democracy – and how can we measure it?. Political Science and
Politics, 36(1), 51-57. https://doi-org.helicon.vuw.ac.nz/10.1017/S1049096503001689
Further links:
Excellent summary and discussion, Simon (despite some minor censorship violations!). The findings remain similar in later research by Inglehart and Welzel. Though your point about how these values are determined is well-taken, the index of self-expression values typically has I think 4 questions?
ReplyDeleteOne question here is why might we expect self-expression values to have an impact on democracy, while an explicit preference for democracy itself does not?