https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8581-5481
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article explores the connection between democratic values and participation in the context of potential democratic deconsolidation. It has been shown that the democratic understanding among citizens is not universal and, especially, new democracies are full of democrats with adjectives. Subsequently, these values influence participatory behaviour. I argue that the previously found mixed evidence on the impact of the external efficacy on participation is derived by neglecting the individual position on democracy. The country-specific data from the Czech ISSP Citizenship Module II provide information on the multiple dimensions of liberal democracy and allow for clustering citizens into four groups: Liberal Democrats, Liberal Non-democrats, Illiberal Democrats and Xenophobic Democrats. The results show disordinal interaction for the effect of external efficacy. In comparison to the rest, the Liberal Non-democrats are encouraged to participate when they perceive the government to be responsive.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Booth and Seligson, The Legitimacy Puzzle in Latin America, 144.
2 O’Donnell, “Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies.”
3 Schedler and Sarsfield, “Democrats With Adjectives.”
4 Rupnik, “The Specter Haunting Europe.”
5 Foa and Mounk, “The Danger of Deconsolidation”; Foa and Mounk, “The Signs of Deconsolidation”; cf. Inglehart, “The Danger of Deconsolidation.”
6 Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization is Here.”
7 Linz and Stepan, “Toward Consolidated Democracies.”
8 Havlík, “Technocratic Populism and Political Illiberalism in Central Europe.”
9 Schedler and Sarsfield, “Democrats With Adjectives,” 638–639.
10 Zakaria, The Future of Freedom.
11 Levitsky and Way, “Elections Without Democracy.”
12 Dalton, Sin, and Jou, “Understanding Democracy.”
13 Gherghina and Geisel, “Linking Democratic Preferences.”
14 Bolzendahl and Coffee, “Are ‘Good’ Citizens ‘Good’ Participants?”; Dalton, “Citizenship Norms and the Expansion.”
15 Webb, “Who is Willing to Participate?”
16 Wolff, “Political Incorporation in Measures of Democracy.” While this article stresses the liberal aspects of democracy, Wolf focuses on the role of political incorporation instead.
17 Canache, Mondak, and Seligson, “Meaning and Measurement”; Quaranta, “How Citizens Evaluate Democracy”; Wolff, “Political Incorporation in Measures of Democracy”; cf. Anderson, “Good Questions, Dubious Inferences.”
18 Flanagan et al., “What Does Democracy Mean?”
19 Schedler and Sarsfield, “Democrats With Adjectives.”
20 For example, the last three European Consortium for Political Research general conferences (2018–2020) featured a panel devoted to the topic. Similarly, the July 2018 edition of Journal of Democracy was devoted to the explanation of the illiberal turn in Eastern Europe.
21 Krastev and Holmes, “How Liberalism Became ‘The God That Failed’.”
22 Rupnik, “The Specter Haunting Europe,” 80.
23 Bustikova and Guasti, “The Illiberal Turn or Swerve.”
24 Rupnik, “The Specter Haunting Europe,” 78.
25 Scott, Šmahelová, and Macek, “Our Democracy: Czech Adolescents Talk.”
26 Detailed information about the sampling procedures are in the study report (see Scholz, Šmahelová, and Macek, “Our Democracy: Czech Adolescents Talk”). The computer-assisted personal interviews were conducted between 11 April and 8 August 2014 and the response rate was 46.4%. The survey started within six months of the 2013 general election and less than three months after the new government, including the populist ANO movement, was formed.
27 A great example of this approach is Ronald Inglehart’s typology of citizens as materialistic, post-materialistic, and two mixed groups. However, the arbitrary threshold between liberal and illiberal values would be inevitably unprecise as well. On the other hand, the addition of intermediate categories would result in further growth of the number of groups.
28 Gugiu and Centellas, “The Democracy Cluster Classification Index.”
29 Vatter and Stadelmann-Steffen, “Subnational Patterns of Democracy.”
30 Wolfson, Madjd-Sadjadi, and James, “Identifying National Types.”
31 Saint-Arnaud and Bernard, “Convergence or Resilience?”
32 McMenamin, “Varieties of Capitalist Democracy.”
33 Flanagan et al., “What Does Democracy Mean?”
34 Schedler and Sarsfield, “Democrats With Adjectives”; see also Klicperová-Baker and Košťál, “European Sociopolitical Mentalities.”
35 Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and clustering are complementary methods. PCA in the first stage reduces the “statistical noise” and subsequently leads to more robust clustering in the next stage (see Husson, Josse, and Pages, “Principal Component Methods-Hierarchical Clustering-Partitional Clustering”). All initial variables were previously recoded to higher values to represent the higher preference for authoritarian/illiberal values. PCA also solves a problem of correlated variables as the Euclidean distance is used for cluster analysis. Variables entered the cluster analysis standardized.
36 See Murtagh and Legendre, “Ward’s Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering Method.” The clustering of cases as used here is an exploratory classification technique. Therefore, it represents an unsupervised method, that is, the number of groups and their property is not known in advance. The main guiding principle is that cases inside a cluster are similar to each other in relation to the observed variables, and dissimilar to cases outside the cluster (Everitt, Cluster Analysis). Hierarchical clustering starts with separate cases and combines them based on a chosen criteria, for example, Ward’s method with listwise deletion of cases (N = 1282; 83.7% of total cases). The agglomerative method aggregates cases to cumulatively minimize the loss of information, that is, when the individual case is replaced by the mean group information of a cluster to which it is being merged. Hierarchical method combines cases until one cluster comprising all cases is formed. Therefore, it is up to the researcher to choose an appropriate number of clusters. Based on the agglomeration schedule and dendrogram, I settled on a four cluster solution. The agglomerative coefficient is 0.997, showing a good clustering structure (see Kaufman and Rousseeuw, Finding Groups in Data, 212, 215–221). The subsequent k-means clustering demands the number of groups to be specified beforehand. However, its algorithm enables re-assigning of cases to clusters and is not as influenced by outliers as Ward’s method. A combination of both is then the most appropriate approach in this case.
37 Park and Chang, “Regime Performance and Democratic Legitimacy,” 56–57.
38 The Czech ISSP 2014 data offer two other questions related to democracy that were excluded from the analysis. The first excluded question asks: “How well does democracy work in the Czech Republic today?” and does not directly relate to the general democratic regime support. Still, it offers some kind of benchmark as it is the only question comparable among all the ISSP countries. The Czech Republic is significantly under the mean values of the whole group and ranks fourth from the bottom of the 38 countries involved. The only countries with lower aggregate scores were Spain, Poland and Slovenia. Second is the “Churchillian” measure of democracy which expects democracy to be the worst form of government except for all the rest. It also offers a statement that the choice does not matter. The wording in comparison to some other internationally asked “Churchillian” questions does not specify the non-democratic regime but rather an “authoritarian and dictatorship” choice. Therefore, it limits citizens’ options and does not allow for the less polarized view on democracy versus non-democracy. Furthermore, the question is suitable for aggregation on the country level not for individual classification. The 20.2% of respondents who chose the statement that the form of the government does not matter for people like them are hard to pinpoint. Overall, 64.5% chose democracy as preferable to any other form of government. Only 15.3% chose the non-democratic variant. If one would limit the analysis to this question, Czech citizens would seem to be quite pro-democratic.
39 These are among the battery of questions Q28–Q36 in the basic questionnaire: That all citizens have an adequate standard of living; That people be given more opportunities to participate in public decision-making; That citizens may engage in acts of civil disobedience when they oppose government actions; That people convicted of serious crimes lose their citizen rights; That long-term residents of a country, who are not citizens, have the right to vote in that country’s national elections; That citizens have the right not to vote; That health care be provided for everyone.
40 The Cronbach alpha of the index is 0.823. The multiple correspondence analysis shows that the first dimension explains 97.27% of the variation in data and the correlation of this factor with the additive index is 0.993.
41 See Schedler and Sarsfield, “Democrats With Adjectives.” The quartiles are based on the mathematical division of the scales into four equal parts.
42 I am indebted to one of the reviewers for pointing out that the results are as equally positive as negative. Overall, in the young democracy the results can be seen more as a glass half full.
43 Diamond, Developing Democracy.
44 Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory, 88–89; It is important to note that participation plays only a peripheral role in the early theory of polyarchy.
45 See Canache, “Citizens’ Conceptualizations of Democracy”; cf. Quintelier and Deth, “Supporting Democracy.”
46 Brady, Verba, and Schlozman, “Beyond SES.”
47 Dalton, “Citizenship Norms and the Expansion.”
48 Brady, Verba, and Schlozman, “Beyond SES,” 271.
49 See also Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality.
50 Raney and Berdahl, “Birds of a Feather?”
51 Finkel, Muller, and Opp, “Personal Influence, Collective Rationality.”
52 Gamson, Power and Discontent.
53 Klingemann, “Dissatisfied Democrats”; Webb, “Who is Willing to Participate?”
54 Norris, Democratic Deficit.
55 Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture; cf. Dalton and Welzel, The Civic Culture Transformed.
56 O’Donnell, “Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies.”
57 Van Deth, “Political Participation,” 7.
58 Booth and Seligson, The Legitimacy Puzzle in Latin America.
59 Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, Stealth Democracy.
60 Hoffman and Thomson, “The Effect of Television Viewing,” 9.
61 Verba and Nie, Participation in America; Brady, Verba, and Schlozman, “Beyond SES”; Niemi, Craig, and Mattei, “Measuring Internal Political”; Valentino, Gregorowicz, and Groenendyk, “Efficacy, Emotions and the Habit”; cf. Shingles, “Black Consciousness and Political Participation.”
62 Gamson, Power and Discontent; see also Pollock and Philip, “The Participatory Consequences”; Gastil and Xenos, “Of Attitudes and Engagement.”
63 Sulitzeanu-Kenan and Halperin, “Making a Difference.”
64 Muller and Opp, “Rational Choice and Rebellious”; Opp, Käte, and Heinrichs, “Conditions for Conventional and Unconventional Political Participation.”
65 Seligson, “Trust, Efficacy and Modes of Political Participation”; Shingles, “Black Consciousness and Political Participation.”
66 Schlozman, Verba, and Brady, The Unheavenly Chorus, 3.
67 Verba and Nye, Participation in America, 2.
68 Vecchione and Caprara, “Personality Determinants of Political Participation”; Vráblíková, “How Context Matters?”
69 Eveland and Hively, “Political Discussion Frequency,” 214–215.
70 There is no significant difference in results between analysis on weighted and unweighted data.
71 Aiken, West, and Reno, Multiple Regression; Jaccard and Turrisi, Interaction Effects in Multiple Regression.
72 Miller et al. “Group Consciousness and Political Participation.”
73 Zhou and Ou-Yang, “Explaining High External Efficacy in Authoritarian Countries.”
74 Iyengar, “Subjective Political Efficacy as a Measure of Diffuse Support.”
75 Finkel, “Reciprocal Effects of Participation and Political Efficacy.”
76 Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture, 346–7.
77 Gamson, Power and Discontent.
78 Cf. Quintelier and Van Deth, “Supporting Democracy.”
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Jakub Bakule
Jakub Bakule is currently a doctoral student in Political Science at Palacký University Olomouc. His research interests include political participation and theory of democracy. Recently he is working on the negative impact of prejudice on deliberation.