Political parties in developing country democracies are often characterized by undemocratic internal party practices, including for selecting party organizational leaders. Scholars identify institutional, party-level, and demographic factors as driving such practices. In this paper, we contribute to this research by considering the effect of two personal factors—personal religiosity and membership in a political family. Politicians act in accordance with personal values and strategic incentives. We argue religiosity influences both in ways that undermine support for democratic intra-party selection practices. We hypothesize that membership in a political family increases the undemocratic effects of high religiosity because it strengthens the capacity of highly religious dynasts to access and mobilize politically through religious and family networks. This strengthens their strategic independence from their party, leading them to support undemocratic leadership selection practices. We test this prediction for the case of Turkey using original data from a 2017 survey of 200 Turkish politicians. We find that religiosity is only associated with reduced support for democratic leadership selection practices among politicians who are members of political families. This result is robust to the inclusion of party-specific effects, religious party membership, and individual characteristics including support for political Islam.
Democracy is not an exclusively national concept, and subnational governments vary in respect for democratic norms and institutions. In subnational authoritarian enclaves, incumbents manipulate elections using fraud, corruption, institutional manipulation, or repression to maintain power. While we know a fair amount about how these authoritarian enclaves form and democratize, we know much less about how they affect the people that live in them. Does subnational democracy influence evaluations of democratic performance? I argue that individuals incorporate subnational outcomes into overall evaluations of democracy, and that subnational democracy positively influences these evaluations. To test this argument, I combine a new measure of subnational democracy, the Subnational Electoral Democracy Scale, with the fifth and sixth waves of the World Values Survey. I find that people living in states with high electoral democracy scores are likely to believe that elections are not manipulated, human rights are protected, and that their country is democratic.
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