Disobedience and support for democracy: Evidences from the World Values Survey

Abstract

For some time, social movement research and political science have studied protests and activists. However, little empirical research attempts to relate movements to the type of social change they endeavour to achieve. In this paper, we suggest that different psychosocial processes may distinguish between different types of movement and protest. In particular, we cross lines between classical social psychology studies on the individual–authority relationship and studies on protest and social movements. We focus attention on the psychological processes triggered in obedience/disobedience. Our results show that when disobedience is associated with attitudes of inclusiveness, it is also positively linked to prodemocratic individual attitudes and to the enhancement of democracy at institutional levels.

Keywords:

• Obedience
• Protest
• Responsibility
• Democracy
• Social movements
• Authority

Notes

1 For a discussion of factors influencing inclusiveness see Passini (2010).

2 Data were retrieved from the WVS website (http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/).

3 The social tolerance indicator is computed as the mean answer to the WVS question “Could you please sort out any people that you would not like to have as neighbours?” relative to people of a different race, Muslims, immigrants, drug addicts, people with AIDS, and homosexuals.

4 The adjusted likelihood ratio test (LMR) proposed by Lo, Mendell and Rubin (2001) compares the improvement in fit between neighbouring class models (i.e., comparing k − 1 and k class models) and provides a p value that indicates when the improvement in fit for the inclusion of one more class is significant. BLRT (Nylund, Asparouhov, & e Muthén, 2007) instead uses bootstrap samples to estimate the distribution of the log likelihood difference test statistic. Akin to LMR, the BLRT provides a p value that can be used to compare the increase in model fit between the k − 1 and k class models.

5 BIC offsets the fit of the model with the number of estimated parameters, assuming that a model is penalized by the number of estimated parameters. The best model according to the criteria of economy and fit is the model with the lowest values of BIC (Eid, Langeheine, & Diener, 2003).

6 We chose to label the two higher level classes on the basis of the lower level class distribution. However the low protest class could be interpreted as the group of countries with lower levels of democracy. The 1999 level of institutionalized democracy (see next section for details on the indicator) has a coefficient of −0.63, p < 0.001, when inserted as second level covariate in the model. That confirms that the low protest countries have significantly lower level of democracy than the high protest countries.

7 The present LCA differs from normal regression models in modelling protesters vs. non-protesters as discrete subpopulations instead of one population with a normal distribution of protest engagement, and high vs. low inclusiveness as discrete groups, instead of one population with continuous normally distributed inclusiveness.

8 http://www.freedomhouse.org/.