Elements of a ProDemocratic Civic Culture:

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Elements of a Pro-Democratic Civic
Culture Which Citizen Attitudes are Most
Conducive to Democracy?
Chris Welzel Professor of Political
Science c.welzel_at_iu-bremen.de
IUB-Advisory Board, Annual Meeting (IUB 04 / 2004)
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Starting Point
Premise Mass tendencies in individual-level
attitudes impact have system-level effects on
democracy. Problem Most studies analyze
attitudes at individual-level, leaving their
system- level effects untested.
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Democracy as the Dependent Variable

• Two Versions of Democracy
• The Institutional Presence of Democracy
• (measured by the degree of
  institutionalization of civil and
• political liberties using Freedom House
  scores)
• The Effective Practice of Democracy
• (presence of democracy graded by measures
  of the quality of democracy,
• here World Bank measures of law-conform
  uses of state power by elites)

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Formal and Effective Versions of Liberal Democracy
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Three Rival Approaches
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Political Culture and Democracy Zero-Order Correl
ations
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Political Culture and Democracy Partial Correlati
ons
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Political Culture and Democracy Multiple
Regressions
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Effects of Self-expression Values and Support for
Democracy under Mutual Controls
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A Sufficient but Not Necessary Condition
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System Preferences for Autocracy versus Democracy
at the Individual Level
Individual-level support for democracy reflects
instrumental rather than intrinsic support.
Precisely for this reason, mass tendencies in
individual-level support for democracy have no
pronounced effect on democratic institutions
at the system-levelif one controls for mass
tendencies in self-expression values.
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Partitioning Support for Democracy into
Instrumental and Intrinsic Components
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Conclusion
Social and political attitudes are important for
democracy in so farand almost only insofaras
they are coupled with emancipative
values emphasizing human self-expression. By
the same token, attitudes that are uncoupled with
self-expression values seem to be irrelevant to
democracy. This applies in particular to overt
support for democracy. These findings confirm
Human Development Theory, which maintains that
democracy is an emancipative achievement It
flourishes in cultures that emphasize intrinsic
human choice and self-expression.
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