Democracy
Conceptualizing and measuring support for democratic institutions and processes
How to measure support for democratic institutions?
Authors:
J.L. Gibson; Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy,Washington University
Publisher:
[publisher information not available], 2006
Whether democracy can take root and thrive depends on the commitments of ordinary citizens to the institutions and processes of democracy. However, there is no consensus on how best to measure mass support for democratic institutions and processes.
This paper argues that developing indices of support for democratic institutions and processes can be thought of as a multi-stage factor analytic problem. It defines the first order factors using sub-scales, such as political tolerance. Then the second-order analysis specifies an overriding latent variable, which is overall support for democratic institutions and processes.
The author shows that support for democratic institutions and processes is a meta-concept comprising attitudes towards various institutions and processes. In this sense, the author says, it is useful to think of a syndrome of democratic values
An important empirical question concerns how these various dimensions of democracy are inter-correlated. The author says one should not assume that all of these sub-scales are uni-dimensional or, more important, that the syndrome of attitudes necessarily can be defined by a single overriding factor.
The degree to which these various aspects of democracy are integrated in the minds of ordinary citizens becomes a substantive issue that is of considerable importance for the understanding of a political culture of transition.
