How Solid is Mass Support for Democracy—And How Can We Measure It?

A decade has passed since the Third Wave of democratization brought an avalanche of new, relatively unstable democracies into being, raising the question, “How solid is support for democracy in these countries?” In the intervening years, public support for democracy has faded in some countries, many of which are democratic in name only. It is unclear how long even the pretense of electoral democracy will survive in the Soviet successor states, apart from the Baltics (Brzezinski 2001). The prospects for democracy in Islamic countries seem particularly poor, with some writers arguing that the basic values of Islamic publics may be incompatible with liberal democracy (Huntington 1993, 1996). This article examines this claim, using the 1999–2001 wave of the World Values Survey, which includes 10 Islamic countries, making it possible for the first time to compare the Islamic world with other major cultural zones. We find surprisingly widespread support for democracy among Islamic publics—at least by conventional measures. Several major empirical research programs are monitoring public support for democratic institutions, including the New Democracies Barometer, the New Russia Barometer, the LatinoBarometer, the AfroBarometer, the European Values Survey, and the World Values Survey. Some degree of consensus has developed concerning which items are most effective, so that certain questions, measuring overt support for democracy, are regularly utilized in these surveys. These questions seem well designed, and they demonstrate internal consistency: people who support democracy on one indicator, tend to support democracy on other indicators. But our faith in these measures rests primarily on their face validity: no one has demonstrated that a high level of mass support for these items is actually conducive to democratic institutions. Conceivably, other factors could be even more important than overt support for democracy. A massive literature argues that interpersonal trust plays a crucial role in democracy (Putnam 1993; Warren 1999; Norris 1999). Furthermore, Gibson (1998) has argued convincingly that tolerance of outgroups is essential to democracy: civil liberties and legitimate opposition require tolerance and forbearance toward groups with whom one disagrees and dislikes. Moreover, three decades of time-series data demonstrate an intergenerational shift toward Postmaterialist values, linked with rising levels of economic development (Inglehart 1977, 1997; Inglehart and Abramson 1999). Since Postmaterialists give high priority to protecting freedom of speech and to participation in making important government decisions, this trend should bring growing mass demands for democratization. Finally, economic success seems to help legitimate democratic institutions. The fall of Germany’s Weimar Republic was linked with its failure to provide economic security during the Great Depression; conversely, the success of democracy in Germany after World War II was linked with the postwar economic miracle, causing democratic institutions to be associated with economic and social wellbeing. Accordingly, high levels of subjective well-being among the public are closely correlated with democracy (Inglehart 1997). All of these qualities—tolerance of outgroups, interpersonal trust, the Postmaterialist emphasis on civil rights and political participation, and a sense of subjective well-being—may contribute to the emergence and flourishing of democracy, but the questions that measure them make no explicit reference to democracy. By contrast, questions that measure overt support for democracy have an obvious face validity, which may be one reason why the various programs that monitor support for democracy focus mainly on measuring overt support. Until now, no one has determined whether the various indicators of mass attitudes are actually linked with democracy at the societal level. This article examines that question. We will measure how strongly the individual-level responses to given survey items are linked with high (or low) levels of democracy. The World Values Survey/European Values Survey (WVS/EVS) now provide data from more than 70 societies, ranging from authoritarian regimes to established democracies, enabling us to analyze the empirical linkages between individuallevel survey responses within each society, and a society’s level of democracy, as measured by the Freedom House political rights and civil liberties scores. Our findings are unambiguous. Although overt lip service to democracy is almost universal today, it is not necessarily an accurate indicator of how deeply democracy has taken root in a given country. The extent to which a society emphasizes a syndrome of tolerance, trust, political activism, and Postmaterialist values is a much stronger predictor of stable democracy. This syndrome has been labeled “Self-expression values:” a society that ranks high on one of these qualities tends to rank high on all of them; societies that rank low on all of them, emphasize “Survival values.” The Survival vs. Self-expression dimension is a major axis of crosscultural variation, and it is closely linked with economic development, which brings a shift from emphasis on Survival values to growing emphasis on Self-expression values (Inglehart and Baker 2000). This helps explain why economic development is conducive to democracy: by themselves, high levels of wealth do not necessarily bring democracy (if they did, Kuwait would be one of the world’s leading democracies). But in so far as economic development brings rising levels of tolerance, trust, political activism, and greater emphasis on freedom of speech (the components of Self-expression values) it leads to growing mass demands for liberalization in authoritarian societies, and to rising levels of direct mass participation in societies that are already democratic. The Survival/Self-expression dimension was not developed for analysis of democracy; it emerged as one of two major dimensions in an analysis of crossnational cultural variation, and is closely linked with the rise of post-industrial society. Although Inglehart and Baker (2000) present strong evidence that economic development brings a shift from