European Sociopolitical Mentalities: Identifying Pro- and Antidemocratic Tendencies

ABSTRACT

The article focuses on citizens’ predispositions for democracy and discusses the concepts of democratic mentality, demos, and demoi. Democratic mentality was operationalized by attitudes, values, and behavioral tendencies which promote civility and civic political culture. Theoretical analysis is followed by an empirical assessment of diverse intranational and international mentalities: prodemocratic, antidemocratic, and nondemocratic tendencies. Constellations of attitudes were explored by secondary data analysis of European Values Study (EVS wave 4, 2008–2010 period, 44 countries, 73 questionnaire items). Individual citizens (N = 63,281) were classified by k-means cluster analysis into: (1) ‘secular democrats’, (2) ‘religious democrats’, (3) ‘nondemocratic skeptics’, (4) ‘antidemocratic intolerant economically deprived traditionalists’, and (5) ‘antidemocratic religious radicals’. All mentalities occurred in each country; countries differed by the incidence of democratic (1 + 2), nondemocratic (3), and antidemocratic (4 + 5) mentalities. Democratic mentality was prevalent in the Northwest (especially in Scandinavia) and among elites; its average incidence in Europe was 40.9%. The results manifested trans-nationally shared political mentalities of European citizens, indicated that democrats were significantly present in every country, and confirmed presence of a robust demos in the North-Western Europe. International democratic mentality (trans-national demos) can be viewed as a possible source of democratic peace (Pax democratica). Civility was an important component of democratic mentality. It was demonstrated that democracy can function without prevalent active political participation but it is hard to conceive democracy without widespread civility. Whenever democracy is being exported or restored, the process must primarily focus on civility and not be limited to mere cultivation of political culture.

Key words:

• democratic mentality
• antidemocratic tendencies
• demos
• elites
• cluster analysis
• EVS

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ We conducted probes which indicated that the patterns of attitudes between the subsequent EVS waves were surprisingly steady even if the questionnaire items did not completely overlap (wave 3 and wave 4 of EVS were compared).

² For instance, in a univariate analysis, it may be hard to distinguish among respondents from many countries if they attain very high rating on democratic attitudes. Using cluster analysis, we can combine several dimensions such as tolerance, political activism, religiousness, trust in people, etc. Thus we obtain a profile, a mentality by which we can distinguish, e.g., between groups of people who are (1) prodemocratic, tolerant, politically active, and not at all, or not extremely religious from (2) those who consider themselves also prodemocratic but at the same time much less tolerant and very religious.

³ Since variables had different formats, we followed Field's suggestion (2000: 8) “There are a number of ways in which data can be standardized but the most easily understood is to convert to a Z score”.

⁴ Based on factor analyses, extensive EVS batteries were reduced into fewer saturated variables – e.g., attitudes toward immigrants, social distance, trust in institutions.

⁵ By inclusion of all relevant variables to the analysis we knowingly exceeded number of variables recommended for the procedure by some authors (Berkhin 2006; Řezanková et al. 2008: 30); however, we found all 73 items significantly correlated to five-cluster solution (52 with η > .200; mean η = .303) and we avoided the danger of multicollinearity as our criteria were intercorrelated to a very low degree (mean r = .015; std deviation = .100).

⁶ We also conducted multivariate analysis, namely, multinomial regression (NOMREG) by SPSS. Its goodness of fit test (GOF) confirms very close fit between the model and data (Pearson and deviance tests χ² sig. = 1.00 and .379, respectively) and pseudo R² between .537 and .560 suggests rather strong relationship with predictors. The same predictors as those on bivariate level described here attained satisfactory significance level <.001 in Likelihood-ratio tests of NOMREG. The interpretation of the predictors’ effect on five-cluster variance is the same as is presented here in less complex language of bivariate interactions.

Additional information

Funding

This article has been written as part of the research and dissemination activities of EUROSPHERE (http://eurospheres.org), an integrated project that was funded by the European Union's 6th Framework Programme and coordinated by the University of Bergen with the participation of 17 European research institutions; in its final stages, this study was supported also by RVO 68081740 and by a grant of the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic, Psychosocial Analysis of non-democratic character in a postcommunist society [15-11062S].

Notes on contributors

Martina Klicperová-Baker

Martina Klicperová-Baker, Political Psychologist (Charles University, Prague, Czechoslovakia), Research Fellow at the Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and San Diego State University; fields of interests: Psychology of Democracy, Psychology of Transition to Democracy; publication outlets include: Sage Handbook of Citizenship and Democracy, Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, Behavioral Processes, Time and Society, Global Bioethics.

Jaroslav Košťál

Jaroslav Košt'ál, Sociologist (Charles University, Prague, Czechoslovakia), Research Fellow at the Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic with an extensive practice in opinion polling; fields of interest: multivariate statistical methods in social sciences, political culture in Europe; publication outlets include: The Public-Javnost, Ceskoslovenska psychologie, co-author of books Democratic Culture in the Czech Republic: Civic culture, ethos and patriotism in comparative perspective and Political Culture and Democratic Citizenship in Comparative Perspective.