Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The paper proposed here aims at unraveling the effects of
political institutions on public’s support for democracy. Many students
of democratization have regarded public support for democracy as one of
the quintessential elements leading a country to democratic
consolidation. Countries without substantial level of public support
for principles and practices of democratic politics has been degraded
as merely “electoral” or “delegative” democracies even though they have
competitive elections. Consolidated democracy can stand only on the
culture in which ordinary citizens habitually believe in and behave
according to the norms and rules of democracy. Some students of new
institutionalism argue that certain institutions can encourage breeding
higher levels of public support for democracy than others (Anderson and
Guillory 1997; Norris 1999). Focusing upon how institutions make
winners and losers, their analyses show that more inclusive and
consensus oriented institutions are better to produce more democratic
support than majoritarian institutions. It is a very interesting
finding broadening topics and knowledge of institutional engineering.
However, previous studies have several problems. (1) Their cases are
usually limited in western and matured democracies. (2) More
significantly, they do not consider the recent achievement of the
studies of democratic support: Public support for democracy is
multidimensional and multidirectional. (3) Measuring institutional
variable is very limited and too simplified. In this paper, using World
Value Survey data and other the most recent datasets, not only do we
increase the number of cases significantly including old and new
democracies, but also we compose new indicators measuring institutions:
executive systems, electoral systems and levels of decentralization.
More importantly, we conceptually divide public support for democracy
into four dimensions: supports for democratic principles, performance
of democracy, democratic institutions and personnel in democratic
government. Following Lijphart works (Lijphart 1999), we believe
consensus oriented institutions due to their nature of inclusiveness
are better tools to raise public support. Unlike previous works,
however, we hypothesize that not only do each institution make diverse
influences on public support but also they are differently embodied in
each dimension of democratic support. Our project will reveals more
complicated patterns of institutional impacts on democratic support,
which has been hidden in the previous studies. Ultimately, it will
contribute to enrich current theory and knowledge of institutional
designing.