Social media presents a contradictory relationship with democracy. Once, it was regarded as a tool for democracy, providing alternative sources of information and coordinating social movements for ...democratization. Later it also became a tool for authoritarian regimes to control information and spread propaganda to stay in power. This mixed perception suggests that both democratic and authoritarian forces can use social media to influence public opinion. This presents a puzzle to the relationship between social media use and democratic understanding. Does social media promote or erode understanding of democracy? This study argues that the effect of social media use on understanding of democracy depends on higher education. The relationship also differs between democracies and non-democracies. Using the newest wave of the World Values Survey (wave 7, 2017-2020), this study analyses the influence of social media use on understanding of democracy in non-democracies and democracies. The findings suggest that social media use positively affects understanding of democracy in democratic countries. However, the democratic effect of social media is nullified in non-democracy unless it interacts with higher education. The findings offer implications for the relationship between social media, higher education, and understanding of democracy.
The subject of this article are the ways of understanding democracy in Poland during a crisis of democracy. Six studies were conducted in 2016-2019 on nationwide samples of adult Poles with the use ...of CAWI and CAPI methodology. Using exploratory factor analysis, we found that the term democracy may have different colloquial meanings. The first one is understanding democracy as “privileges and rights” (since the second half of 2016, enriched with cultivating national values), which we interpret as a populist meaning. An accurate way of understanding democracy was revealed to have existed in the first half of 2016, after which it dissolved into a populist understanding of democracy. Identifying democracy with a Catholic state was the most stable in time. This direction of changes turned out to be sustainable in the light of the results of research conducted on representative samples in 2017 and 2019 with the use of CAPI methodology.Additionally, it turned out that an accurate understanding of democracy increased support for democracy, while understanding democracy as a Catholic state decreased support for democracy. The populist understanding turned out to be unrelated to support for democracy. This changeability in the ways of understanding democracy is explained by events that took place in Poland since 2015 which deepened the crisis of democracy.
By taking the official state ideology into consideration, this article seeks to contribute to the study of public opinion of democracy under non-democratic regimes by analysing both qualitative and ...quantitative evidence collected in China. An examination of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s discourse on democracy reveals that the CCP endorses popular sovereignty and political participation while denying political contestation. Meanwhile, the concept of democracy can have three distinctive meanings among ordinary Chinese: democracy as freedom, democracy as political participation to ensure government accountability, and democracy as good socio-economic performance. Survey data show that the majority of informed Chinese respondents treat democracy as political participation to ensure government accountability, which indicates that Chinese understanding of democracy has reached to a certain degree of consensus that is closer to universally-shared idea of democracy rather than being culturally distinctive.
Measuring the quality of democracy Pickel, Susanne; Breustedt, Wiebke; Smolka, Theresia
International political science review,
11/2016, Volume:
37, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
New indices measuring the quality of democracy constitute a significant innovation in comparative political science. They might, however, provide a biased perspective because they largely focus on ...macro-level criteria. Thus, the question is whether the measurement of the quality of democracy can be improved by complementing the evaluations of these indices with assessments based on individual-level survey data. Using data from 20 established democracies in the European Social Survey 2012 and the Democracy Barometer, we compare the understandings and evaluations of the quality of democracy underlying these two measurement approaches. We demonstrate that while the results coincide to a certain extent, individual-level data provide an important complementary perspective that adds to the validity of the measurement of the quality of democracy.
Through an empirical comparative analysis, we found that people in mainland China and Taiwan demonstrate strong similarities in their support for democracy, based on democratic suitability, ...efficiency, preference, and priority. There are also differences in beliefs about democratic values. Compared to people in mainland China, the Taiwanese have a deeper and more widely shared belief in the principles of participation and pluralism, while the differences between their beliefs in the principles of equality, freedom, and checks and balances are narrow. Furthermore, people in mainland China and Taiwan have a strong similarity in their understanding of democracy, that is, they all present a mixed democratic understanding based on substantive bias. Overall, although the differences between mainland China and Taiwan’s democratic practices are reflected in the level of value identification from the perspective of democratic support and democratic understanding, the popular democratic political culture in mainland China and Taiwan still has a relatively broad consensus. Thus, the integration and development of cross-strait relations not only has an increasingly profound social and economic foundation but also considerable consensus and mass support on the political and cultural level.
Global support for democracy is puzzling in the time of alleged backlash toward democracy. Building on recent studies on democratic support that take into consideration heterogeneity in the ...subjective perceptions of democracy, I conducted a conjoint analysis and examined the trade-offs among various democratic values that the citizens might face when they think of democracy. Using an original dataset of 2,206 respondents, sampled from Japanese adult population, I found that the procedural view of democracy played the most important role when Japanese people evaluated a country's democracy level. In their view, a lack of free and fair elections and disenfranchisement of certain groups were more detrimental to democracy than a shortage of checks and balances, economic growth, and social welfare. In addition, the analysis shows that factors representing the minoritarian view and the substantive view of democracy play an undeniable role in citizens' democracy evaluations, which confirms the discrepancies between how students of democratization conceptualize and how ordinary people think of democracy today.
What do citizens think democracy is and what factors contribute to its meaning? Previous works on the public understanding of democracy have shown that, overall, citizens see democracy in “minimal” ...terms. However, advanced democracies are complex and encompass several elements other than elections and freedoms. This article uses the European Social Survey module “Europeans’ understandings and evaluations of democracy” and multilevel item response theory models to build a measure of the meaning of democracy in terms of multiple attributes and to account for individual- and country-level variation. The findings show that the meaning of democracy can be seen as a continuum, and that middle-aged educated men who are interested in politics, have extreme ideological positions, and are engaged in civic organizations include more elements in their idea of democracy, and that the cross-country variation in the meaning of democracy mostly depends on democratic performance.
Different methods of measurement for survey research have been developed to explore how the public understands democracy. In the existing research on the democratic understanding of the Chinese ...people, closed-ended questions are often used to measure this understanding. However, the results obtained can only prove whether the democratic understanding of the Chinese people deviates from or is close to liberal democracy. This article applied grounded theory to classify respondents' answers to an open-ended question. Unlike previous research findings, this article's findings showed that even Chinese people's democratic understanding has certain procedural or substantive elements. However, this understanding consists of only emphasizing their rights and interests under the Communist Party of China-led system rather than being more inclined toward liberal democracy. Additionally, the higher effective response rates for closed-ended questions suggested that Chinese people need a higher level of political knowledge and engagement in public affairs to form their own understanding of democracy when answering an open-ended question. We argue that although closed-ended questions are more convenient for statistical analysis, open-ended questions with the classification method developed in this study can paint a more accurate picture of respondents' understanding of democracy in China.
Objective/Context: People usually associate democracy with different sorts of values and desirable outcomes. An informed understanding of democracy, however, requires that the public be aware that ...democracy is a regime in which elections are free and fair, the government is bound by the rule of law, and citizens have equal political rights and civil freedoms. This article is a contribution to the scholarship on the public understanding of democracy as a liberal-electoral regime. The central claim is that an informed notion of democracy reinforces the relationship between perception of integrity in the electoral process and confidence in elections as a core institution in the political system. Methodology: Using survey data, the empirical analysis focuses on the case of Mexico, where several observers identify a crucial puzzle: voters systematically distrust elections that are widely regarded as free and fair. The analysis is replicated in other Latin American countries as well. Conclusions: As would be expected, voters are more likely to trust elections when they perceive that ballots are counted fairly, electoral officials are honest, media coverage is balanced, or women have equal opportunities to run for office. The results confirm, furthermore, that perception of electoral integrity is associated with a greater degree of trust in elections on the condition that voters understand democracy as a liberal regime. Originality: This research shows that an accurate understanding of democracy enhances citizens’ abilities to appreciate the link between electoral integrity and the trustworthiness of elections.
