Understanding democracy: Data from unlikely places

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 18, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 142-156

  Dalton, Russell J ^a   Shin, Doh C ^b,c   Jou, Willy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI   (United States)

^c Korean Democracy Barometer Surveys ^*  (South Korea)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 36849027994     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (39)

1. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
2. Ronald Inglehart, "How Solid Is Mass Support for Democracy - and How Can We Measure It?" PS: Political Science & Politics 36 (March 2003): 51.
3. Doh Chull Shin, "Democratization: Perspectives from Global Citizenries," in Russell Dalton and Han-Dieter Klingemann, eds. Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);
4. Russell Dalton and Doh Chull Shin, eds., Citizens, Democracy and Markets around the Pacific Rim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006);
5. Michael Bratton, Robert Mattes, and E. Gyimah-Boadi, Public Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
6. and Richard Rose, William Mishler, and Christian Haerpfer, Democracy and Its Alternatives: Understanding Post-communist Societies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
7. Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi, Public Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform in Africa;
8. and Roderic Camp, ed., Citizen Views of Democracy in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001).
9. Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).
10. Dieter Fuchs and Edeltraud Roller, "Learned Democracy? Support for Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe," International Journal of Sociology 36 (Fall 2006): 70-96.
11. Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
12. Janos Simon, "Popular Conceptions of Democracy in Postcommunist Europe," in Samuel H. Barnes and Janos Simon, eds., The Postcommunist Citizen (Budapest: Erasmus Foundation, 1998).
13. Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi, Public Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform in Africa;
14. and Camp, ed., Citizen Views of Democracy in Latin America, 17.
15. We hear this comment frequently when presenting findings on the remarkable level of support for democracy in many autocratic or transitional political systems. For instance, when 72 percent of the Vietnamese public (in the World Values Survey) say that democracy is the best form of government, the critics claim that this means they want to have the higher standard of living that they identify with the United States but not the U.S. system of government.
16. Mary McIntosh and Martha Abele, "The Meaning of Democracy in a Redefined Europe," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion, St. Charles, Illinois, 1993. In contrast, the same study found that citizens in Britain, France, and West Germany emphasized the political values of political freedom, party competition, and a fair justice system.
17. The Postcommunist Citizen survey was conducted in 1990; it asked: "There is considerable argument concerning the meaning of democracy. What is your opinion about this question? What is for you the meaning of democracy?" This dataset does not include the open-ended responses; we received these marginals from Hans-Dieter Klingemann. The 2000-2001 Afrobarometer question reads: "What, if anything, do you understand by the word 'democracy?' What comes to mind when you hear the word?" (www.afrobarometer. org). The East Asia Barometer used two different questions that overlap with other studies: "To you, what does 'democracy' mean? What else?" or "What for you is the meaning of the word 'democracy?' What else?" (EAB website: eacsurvey.law.niu.edu.tw). The 2001 Latinobarómetro asked "To you, what does 'democracy' mean? What else?" (www. latinobarometro.org). The U.S. results are from Camp, ed., Citizen Views of Democracy in Latin America. The Spanish and Austrian results are from Simon, "Popular Conceptions of Democracy in Postcommunist Europe." The Russian and Ukraine surveys are from the New Soviet Citizen Project (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research ICPSR 6521). The Asia Foundation collected the Afghan and Indonesia surveys (www. asiafoundation.org). We appreciate access to all these surveys, and the analyses presented below are the responsibility of the authors.
18. Before presenting the results, we want to acknowledge the limitations. Comparing responses given to open-ended questions across nations presents a methodological challenge. Even in established democracies, there is an active debate about the political knowledge and sophistication of mass publics. Furthermore, it is difficult to ask open-ended questions in a comparable manner, because they are subject to different interpretations by respondents and answers are often imprecise and must be transcribed by interviewers. Question-order effects may influence open-ended responses, especially when combining different survey projects. The administration of the interview by different survey-research firms can affect the extensiveness of responses and the number of responses to open-ended questions. Then, coders identify the meaning, which can add further variability into the data. In our case, the stem question was similar - but not identical - across nations. Each project then independently coded the responses. Therefore, we used the available coding to construct comparability between these different coding systems. The resulting cross-national evidence is admittedly imprecise (although they are probably more comparable within projects than between projects). Yet this evidence provides valuable insights into public thinking, and the results do present a surprisingly consistent view of how ordinary people think about the meaning of democracy. We therefore focus on broad crossregional patterns rather than the specific percentages in any single nation.
19. The full country-by-country results are presented in Russell Dalton, Doh Chull Shin, and Willy Jou, "Popular Conceptions of the Meaning of Democracy: Democratic Understanding in Unlikely Places," available at http://repositories.cdlib.org/csd/07-03/. The number of nations in each group is as follows: established democracies (4); Eastern Europe (7); Asia (9); Latin America (17); and Africa (12).
20. Each project used its own categories in coding responses. To the best of our ability, we generated comparable broad categories from the specific codes. Using the Afrobarometer as an illustration, "freedom and liberties" includes civil liberties, personal freedoms, group rights, and group freedoms; "institutions and governmental processes" includes voting, electoral choice, multiparty competition, government by the people, government effectiveness and accountability, majority rule; and "social benefits" includes socioeconomic development, personal security, equality and justice, peace, and unity. Other responses, such as general positive or negative comments about democracy, were coded as "other."
21. For instance, the East Asian Barometer and Latinobarometro included categories of "other positive terms" and "other negative terms." Without further information we included these in the "other" category. In addition, "other" included miscellaneous responses such as "national independence," "change government," and references to individual politicians or political parties.
22. Most of the surveys coded up to three responses to the open-ended question. In some nations, however, only one or two responses were coded. To adjust for this difference, we compare substantive responses in Figure 1 as a percentage of all the total responses. Thus if 59.3 percent of Koreans mentioned freedom and civil liberties, this is divided by the total responses (158.3 percent), so that 37.4 percent of the total Korean responses deal with freedom or liberties. Thus the percentages in Figure 1 sum to 100 percent in each column, but the percentage that cites each of the three substantive categories is generally higher when multiple responses are counted.
23. Previous research on advanced industrial democracies debates the sophistication of contemporary publics, and the average citizen's political information and knowledge is limited. Thus we are not implying that responses citing freedom or liberties reflect a full philosophical understanding of these terms. We are suggesting that citizens in developing nations have an understanding of the key tenets of democracy that is greater than previous research has presumed, and the patterns are not dramatically different from the responses offered by citizens in established democracies.
24. Robert Rohrschneider, Learning Democracy: Democratic and Economic Values in Unified Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
25. on the diffusion of international norms, see Wayne Sandholtz and Mark Gray, "International Integration and National Corruption," International Organization 57 (Fall 2003): 761-800.
26. Rohrschneider, Learning Democracy.
27. Rose, Mishler, and Haerpfer, Democracy and Its Alternatives;
28. and Robert Mattes and Michael Bratton, "Learning about Democracy in Africa: Awareness, Performance, and Experience," American Journal of Political Science 51 (January 2007): 192-217.
29. GNP per capita is positively correlated with freedom and liberty responses (.27), and negatively related to "don't know" (-.17), institutions (-.19), and social-benefits responses (-.12). Freedom House democracy scores are positively related to freedom and liberty (.34) and social-benefits responses (.24), and negatively related to "don't know" (-.18) and institutions (-.36) responses.
30. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963);
31. and Lucian Pye and Sidney Verba, eds., Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965).
32. The Afghanistan (2004 and 2006) and Indonesia (1999 and 2004) surveys were conducted by the Asia Foundation. The five East European nations were included in the first wave of the Postcommunist Citizen Project and a second wave conducted around 2000.
33. The full country-by-country results are presented in Dalton, Shin, and Jou, "Popular Conceptions of the Meaning of Democracy." Figures for the Czech Republic at the second timepoint may not be entirely comparable with the Czechoslovak responses at the first timepoint, since the early survey combined the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We could not correct for this because we do not have access to the original surveys.
34. In the five Central and East European countries, the first wave of the survey contained a "rights" category, but the second wave did not. Between 6 percent and 17 percent of respondents were coded as giving a rights response in the first survey. The lack of this category may lower the percentage of "freedom and liberties"-focused responses at the second timepoint.
35. Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi, Public Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform in Africa, 274.
36. Amartya Sen, "Democracy as a Universal Value," Journal of Democracy 10 (July 1999): 3-17;
37. and Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy.
38. Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture;
39. and Pye and Verba, Political Culture and Political Development.