Elements of a ProDemocratic Civic Culture:

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Elements of a Pro-Democratic Civic Culture The
Human Development Perspective
Chris Welzel International University Bremen
(IUB) c.welzel_at_iu-bremen.de
East-West Center, University of Hawaii (03 / 2004)
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Starting Point
Core Premise of the Political Culture
School Mass tendencies in individual-level
attitudes impact on the stability and
performance of democratic institutions at
the system-level. Basic Problem of Political
Culture Studies Although their most central
theoretical assumption refers to system-level
effects of attitudes, most of them analyze the
determination of these attitudes at the
individual-level. Conclusion If one is
interested in attitudes because one assumes that
mass tendencies in these attitudes have
system-level effects on democratic institutions,
one should study these system-level effects.
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Liberal Democracy as the Dependent Variable

• Why Liberal Democracy?
• From the perspective of human development (which
  focuses on peoples
• choice in their daily lives), the liberal aspect
  of democracy is most central
• to ordinary people. For it is the civil liberties
  that entitle people to autonomous
• choices in shaping their private and public
  activities.
• Two Versions of Liberal Democracy
• The Formal Presence of Liberal Democracy
• (measured by the degree of
  institutionalization of civil liberties using
• Freedom House scores)
• The Effective Practice of Liberal Democracy
• (formal presence of civil liberties
  weighed by 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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Explanatory Factors
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An Emancipative Version of Human Development
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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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Support for Democracy and Cultural Zones