Varieties of Democratic Understanding and Political Participation

• In Event: Citizens' Perspectives on Democracy

Abstract

Though contested in many ways via the rise of extremism and the resilience of authoritarianism, democracy is the ideal norm of government in the eyes of many citizens throughout the world. Likewise, as for many politicians, political parties, NGOs, grass-roots movements around the globe, the path to and the preservation of democratic standards is an arduous but glorious task. Yet, ordinary people and politicians alike may and do have different understandings of what democracy entails (Dalton and Klingemann 2007; Cho 2015; Quaranta 2018; Zagrebina 2020). Researchers have offered valuable studies in citizens’ richly divergent views about democracy by offering worldwide patterns for defining democracy (Dalton, Shin and Jou 2007; Zagrebina 2020), or factors that influence these views (Cho 2015), or the influences these conceptualizations have at the attitudinal level (Schedler and Sarsfield 2007; Cho 2014; Alonso 2016). However, the behavioral consequences of different understandings of democracy are often neglected. Although there are exceptional and illuminating works to this regard (see for instance Canache 2012; Oser and Hooghe 2018), the extant body of the literature stands limited as the existing works explore only specific portions of the world (Latin America for Canache 2012; Europe for Oser and Hooghe 2018). This article aims to contribute to the democracy literature by exploring the global linkages between different conceptualizations of democracy and forms of political participation and bridge these two important notions of democracy.

We hypothesize that liberal conceptualizations of democracy are expected to be positively correlated with both conventional and unconventional forms of political participation. We also expect to find that redistributive understandings of democracy are positively correlated with unconventional forms of political action. We finally hypothesize that authoritarian understandings of democracy are expected to be negatively correlated with both forms of political participation. To test our hypotheses of the influence of different democracy conceptualizations on political participation, we utilize two of the most recent World Values Surveys (Waves 6 and 7), including the last wave which has been lately released in July 2020. Our dataset covers data on our key variables for democratic understanding and political participation for the last decade (2010-2020) and aims to offer a diverse, global-level analyses on these variables.

Authors

• Kursat Cinar, Middle East Technical University

• Asya Bülbül