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ABSTRACT
Recent accounts of democratic backsliding are negligent about the cultural foundations of autocracy-vs-democracy. To bring culture back in, I demonstrate that (1) the countries’ membership in culture zones explains some 70% of the global variation in autocracy-vs-democracy and (2) that this culture-bound variation has remained astoundingly constant over time – in spite of all the trending patterns in the global distribution of regime types over the last 120 years. Furthermore, the explanatory power of culture zones over autocracy-vs-democracy roots in the cultures’ differentiation on “authoritarian-vs-emancipative values.” Against this backdrop, lasting regime turnovers happen as a corrective response to glacially accruing regime-culture misfits – driven by generational value shifts into a pre-dominantly emancipatory direction. Consequently, the backsliding of democracies into authoritarianism is limited to societies in which emancipative values remain under-developed. Contrary to the widely cited deconsolidation-thesis, the prevalent generational profile in people’s moral orientations exhibits an almost ubiquitous ascension of emancipative values that will lend more, not less, legitimacy to democracy in the future.
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Notes
1 Y. Mounk, The People vs. Democracy. Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die.
2 Luehrmann et al. (“How Much Democratic Backsliding,” “A Third Wave of Autocratization is There”) attest a new wave of autocratization since the 2010s. By contrast, Lauth, Schlenkrich and Lemm, “Democracy Matrix,” dispute a global democratic recession and diagnose instead a growing hybridization among both democracies and autocracies.
3 Foa and Mounk, “The Dangers of Deconsolidation,” “The Signs of Deconsolidation.”
4 Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy.
5 Putnam and Pharr. Disaffected Democracies.
6 Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart.
7 Dalton, Democratic Challenges – Democratic Choices. Dalton, Political Realignment. Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization. Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy. Norris, Democratic Phoenix. Norris, Democratic Deficit.
8 Against alarmist voices, the largest collection of public opinion data around the globe, the World Values Surveys (www.worldvaluessurvey.org), shows no overall breakdown of public trust (Haerpfer et al., World Values Surveys
9 Norris, Democratic Deficit.
10 Again, and once more against alarmist voices, the data cited in endnote 8 exhibit neither a uniform nor an overall worldwide breakdown in public support for democracy. For proof, see Section 3.2 in the Online Appendix.
11 Alexander and Welzel, “The Myth of Deconsolidation.” Voeten, “Are People Really Turning away from Democracy?.” See also the public opinion trends documented in Section 3 of the Online Appendix.
12 Foa and Mounk, op. cit.
13 The concept of “public mood” describes regular cyclical fluctuations in illiberal-vs-liberal preferences in public opinion among the citizenries of mature democracies (Stimson, Ideology in America).
14 The concept of “emancipative values” describes an internalized appreciation of universal human freedoms (Welzel, Freedom Rising).
15 Pinker, Enlightenment Now.
16 Luehrmann et al., op. cit.; Lauth, Schlenkrich and Lemm, op.cit.
17 Evidence in support of these points follows further below and in Section 4 of the Online Appendix.
18 “Intelligence-lifting” is to be understood literally and refers to the famous “Flynn effect,” which denotes the generational rise of average IQ-scores among the populations of postindustrial knowledge economies (Flynn, Are We Getting Smarter?).
19 From a human empowerment perspective, which is at the heart of most of democratic theory, I consider democracy first and foremost as a system of entitlements provided, protected and enforced by the state—entitlements in the form of civil rights that allow people self-determination in personal affairs, that give them an equal voice and vote in public affairs and that protect them from oppression and discrimination (Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship; Brettschneider, Democratic Rights).
20 Dahl, Polyarchy; Held, Models of Democracy.
21 As Enlightenment values I define the view of human nature due to which our humanity resides in our faculty to think for ourselves and that this faculty entitles us to be trained in this faculty and then to utilize it for personal self-determination and political participation (Grayling, Toward the Light of Liberty).
22 Yilmaz, “The International Context.”
23 Kirsch and Welzel, “Democracy Misunderstood.” Kruse, Ravlik and Welzel, “Democracy Confused.”
24 Ibid.
25 Inglehart and Welzel, op. cit.
26 Welzel and Inglehart, “Political Culture, Mass Beliefs and Value Change.”
27 Brunkert, Kruse and Welzel, “A Tale of Culture-Bound Regime Evolution.”
28 Luehrmann et al., op. cit. But see Lauth, Schlenkrich and Lemm, op.cit., who dispute an autocratization trend and diagnose, instead, a “hybridization” of both democracies and autocracies.
29 Welzel, op. cit.
30 Underlying the statistics is the historically grounded scheme of global cultural zones by Brunkert et al., op. cit.
31 Using data from the World Values Surveys for about a hundred countries, emancipative values measure support for universal freedoms by combining responses to four themes, each of which comprises three questions, including (1) gender equality (support for women’s equal access to education, jobs and politics), (2) child autonomy (independence, imagination and non-obedience as desired child qualities), (3) public voice (support for freedom of speech and public participation in local, job and national affairs) and (4) reproductive freedoms (tolerance of homosexuality, abortion and divorce). Index scores vary between 0 at the authoritarian end and 1.0 at the emancipatory end, with multiple decimal fractions for intermediate positions. Section 1 of the Online Appendix documents the index construction. Besides, there is a dispute about the measurement equivalence of emancipative values. Alemán and Woods (“Value Orientations from the World Values Surveys”) and Sokolov (“The Index of Emancipative Values”) claim that emancipative values do not measure the same concept across countries because the constituent items show different factor loadings in different countries. Brunkert, Inglehart and Kruse et al. (“Non-Invariance?”), by contrast, demonstrate that “compositional substitutability” allows different items to substitute each other’s function in different countries, for which reason non-invariance in factor loadings is no measurement problem.
32 Welzel and Inglehart (op. cit.) find that the predictive power of support for democracy over the countries’ actual levels of democracy is entirely conditional: only that part of support for democracy which is tied to emancipative values predicts subsequent levels of democracy, whereas the part of support for democracy which is decoupled from emancipative values shows no posterior regime effect at all. Claassen, by contrast, finds that mass support for democracy underlies cyclical fluctuations (rather than showing a glacial decline as postulated by Foa and Mounk, op. cit.) and that these cycles drive corresponding cycles in regime dynamics towards more and less democracy, in line with Soroka and Wlezien’s (Degrees of Democracy) thermostatic model of public opinion-policy interactions. Claassen’s (“Does Public Support Help Democracy to Survuve?”) evidence does not contradict Welzel and Inlgehart’s findings because he does not divide support for democracy into its emancipatory and non-emancipatory partition. In light of the findings of Ruck et al. (“The Cultural Foundations of Modern Democracies”) who show that the generational rise of emancipative values drove the global trend towards democracy over recent decades, it can be assumed that Claassen’s findings would come out even stronger, had he measured support for democracy on the condition that this support is coupled with emancipative values.
33 Kirsch and Welzel, op. cit. Kruse, Ravlik and Welzel, op. cit.
34 Deutsch and Welzel, “Emancipative Values and Nonviolent Protest.” For further proof, see Section 3.3 of the Online Appendix.
35 While the close relationship between emancipative values and levels of democracy is undisputed, its causal nature is a matter of debate, reflecting a division over whether the causal arrow in regime-culture coevolution runs from regimes to culture or the other way around. Against the proposition that rising emancipative values drive the ascension of democracy, Spaiser et al. (“The Dynamics of Democracy, Development and Cultural Values”) as well as Dahlum and Knutsen (“Democracy by Demand?”) claim that emancipative values mature under the imprint of democracy. The recent analyses by Brunkert et al. and Ruck et al. (op. cit.) and in this article resolve this dispute in favor of the claim that culture drives regimes more than the other way around.
36 It is an established insight that people reach a stable setpoint in their value orientations once their formative socialization is completed. Therefore, value change advances through generational replacement, which also means that current cohort differences in value orientations show the footprints of value change in the past. This allows one to transpose cohort differences in emancipative values from a recent national survey into a time series of annual measures by projecting the average emancipative values of people from the same birth year into the year in which these people were of a certain age. Section 2 of the Online Appendix documents these backward projections. For a similar procedure, see Ruck et al., op. cit.
37 Welzel and Inglehart, op. cit.
38 Ibid.
39 Rosling, Rosling and Rosling Roennlund, Factfulness. Goldstone and Diamond, “Demography and the Future of Democracy.” Pinker, op. cit.
40 This position has been propagated by the defenders of authoritarian rule in the Asian values debate, while avoiding the term “authoritarian” values and calling them “collectivist” values instead (Yew, “Culture Is Destiny”).
41 Emancipative values bring to dominance humans’ better ethical qualities because these values embody a more indiscriminately benevolent view of people and the world. This is visible in the fact that emancipative values associate with higher out-group trust, stronger respect for human rights and a more universal sense of altruism. Ample evidence for this claim is presented in Welzel, op. cit. (ch. 6).
42 van den Bosch, “Introducing Regime Cluster Theory.”
43 Moore, The Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship.
44 See the evidence in Section 3.2 of the Online Appendix.
45 Kirsch and Welzel; Kruse, Ravlik and Welzel, Citation2018 (op.cit).
46 One of the World Values Survey items actually phrases the meaning of democracy as “people obey their rulers” and this notion of democracy finds high levels of support in non-Western cultures.
47 Brown, “From Democratization to ‘Guided’ Democracy.”
48 For a more detailed picture of the modest global increase in public support for strongmen rule, see Section 3.4 of the Online Appendix.
49 Brunkert et al.; Ruck et al. (op. cit.).
50 Welzel, Inglehart and Kruse, op. cit.
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Christian Welzel
Christian Welzel, Member of the German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), is the Political Culture Research Professor at Leuphana University in Lueneburg, Germany, and Program Director at the National Research University – Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia. He is also the former President and current Vice-President of the World Values Survey. Welzel's research focuses on human empowerment, emancipative values, cultural change, and democratization. Author of more than 150 scholarly publications, he published in 2013 his award-winning monograph Freedom Rising: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation (CUP). His most recent books include Democratization (with Christian Haerpfer, Ronald Inglehart and Patrick Bernhagen, 2nd fully revised and updated edition at OUP 2019) and The Civic Culture Transformed (with Russell J. Dalton, at CUP 2014).