The geography of support for emocracy in Europe

Abstract

This paper focuses on attitudes towards democracy, comparing European citizens' reaction to the principles standing at the basis of their political system. Using data from the fourth wave of the European Values Study, the paper attempts to understand the mechanisms of support for democracy. The paper proposes an explanation of support based on resources, ideology, and communist experience. Special attention is given to the former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, testing the assumption that the mechanisms of support in these countries differ from those in older democracies. The variables of interest used here are the items used in EVS to measure support for democracy and for nondemocratic alternatives. Previous studies used these items to construct an index of support for democracy, assuming the items measure the same underlying dimension. I test this assumption and show that the relationships between the items vary across countries and that a bidimensional solution is more adequate to the data. Using this solution, multilevel regression analyses show that the factors related to support for democracy vary systematically across groups of countries.