A tale of culture-bound regime evolution: the centennial democratic trend and its recent reversal

Abstract

with almost ten staff, and a project team across the world with four Principal Investigators, fifteen Project Managers (PMs), 30+ Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 2,500 Country Experts, the V-Dem project is one of the largest ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.

Is There a Crisis of Democracy in Europe?

“…Source: Brunkert et al (2018, p. 6) democracy. Similarly, while acknowledging that there have been reversals in the trends of democratization, Brunkert et al (2018) emphasize that they have been only temporary. Like Inglehart, they provide reasons for optimism by pointing out that democracy's cultural seeds-emancipative values-have been rising over the generations and are doing so in most parts of the world, including such seeming strongholds of authoritarianism as China, Russia, Singapore, and Turkey.…”

“…A recent survey of the state of democracy across the globe (Van Beek et al 2018) could not find any signs of democratic backsliding for the established democracies of the West, even if there were various problems in other parts of the world. Based on Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data, the best data currently available, Brunkert et al (2018) present the centennial democratic trends for democracy overall as well as for its participatory, liberal, and electoral components, which all have been rising in the long run (see Fig. 1).…”

“…Like Inglehart, they provide reasons for optimism by pointing out that democracy's cultural seeds-emancipative values-have been rising over the generations and are doing so in most parts of the world, including such seeming strongholds of authoritarianism as China, Russia, Singapore, and Turkey. According to Brunkert et al (2018), what really matters is the extent to which people's support for democracy is inspired by emancipative values. And this kind of emancipatory support for democracy is neither in temporal nor generational decline in the most mature democracies, among which we find the western European democracies.…”

“…There might be some wishful thinking involved in their assessment of the state of democracy across the globe. But in Europe, too, the democratic "Zeitgeist" has become more pessimistic (Brunkert et al 2018), and the current public debate about democracy suggests that liberal democracy is in crisis. In Europe, the rise of populism from the right and the left; the imposition of austerity on southern European countries by the Troika; Brexit; and the illiberal measures taken by governments in Hungary and Poland are interpreted by pundits-academics as well as public intellectuals-as so many signs of a crisis of democracy.…”

Introduction: Perspectives on Democracy

“…Along similar lines, behavioral scientists such as Alexander and Welzel (2017), Inglehart (2016), and Norris and Inglehart (2019) claim that the level of democratic support is astonishingly high among all age cohorts in democratic societies. In a comparative and longitudinal analysis covering 116 years, Brunkert et al (2019) found that public support for democracy is closely associated with emancipative values. The authors show that the increasing class polarization and marginalization of lower classes are the real source of the current decreasing dissatisfaction with political institutions and their decision making.…”