Democrayc by demand? : Reinvestigating the effect of values on political institutions.

Abstract

In this thesis I critically investigate and test the central implications of Inglehart and Welzel’s (2005) theory claiming that mass values explain democracy. The proposition that democracies will emerge and survive as a result of liberal aspirations among the general public has a long tradition in the political science literature, but has often gone unrecognized in the recent academic literature on democratization. Drawing on several recent insights from the study of modernization theory I build on Inglehart and Welzel’s studies in order to carry out a more refined and critical test of this theory. My contribution includes methodological, theoretical as well as empirical innovations. Theoretically, I argue that the assumption that values will be converted into collective action and institutional change is challenged by literature pointing to the inherent difficulties of organizing collective action in a society where dictators are able to prevent change through manipulation and coercion. Methodologically, I move past the relationship between values and level of democracy by analyzing the processes of democratic transitions and democratic survival separately, recognizing that they are not necessarily driven by the same causes. At the same time I run more sophisticated estimation techniques which arguably provide more accurate inferences regarding this relationship. Applying these theoretical and methodological insights I discover several novel findings, pointing to a consistent lack of support to the proposition that liberal-democratic values have a positive effect on democracy: Firstly, the positive significant relationship between liberal-democratic values and democracy level found in previous studies disappears, for example, when controlling for country-specific time-invariant factors. Second, there are few indices of a positive effect of liberal-democratic values on neither democratization nor democratic survival. Third, the results surprisingly point in favor of a negative effect of liberal-democratic values on the probability of democratization in the most authoritarian regimes, suggesting that we need to look beyond the theory of Inglehart and Welzel to explain the relation between values and institutional change in authoritarian societies.