Culture and Regimes: The Democratizing Force of Emancipative Values
Title
Culture and Regimes: The Democratizing Force of Emancipative Values
Author
Welzel, Christian
Research Area
Culture
Topic
Culture and Society
Abstract
This essay argues that high‐quality democracy cannot persist in the absence of emancipative values, as much as autocracy cannot persist in their presence. Support for democracy, by contrast, is an altogether misleading indicator of a public's affinity to democracy because what support for democracy means depends entirely on emancipative values: In the presence of emancipative values, people support democracy out of a genuine appreciation of the freedoms that define democracy; but in the absence of emancipative values, people typically misunderstand democracy in authoritarian ways that revert the meaning of support for democracy into its own contradiction: support for autocracy, that is. Hence, autocracy is often more legitimate in people's eyes than the support ratings for democracy suggest. Accordingly, the prospects of democracy are bleak where emancipative values remain weak. These insights provide good reasons to consider emancipative values as a study object of foremost importance, if we are to understand the cultural foundations of democracy.