What drives citizens’ evaluation of democratic performance? The interaction of citizens’ democratic knowledge and institutional level of democracy

Abstract

Alongside citizens’ belief in the legitimacy of democracy, public support for the political regime is crucial to the survival of (democratic) political systems. Yet, we know fairly little about the relationship between citizens’ democratic knowledge and their evaluation of democratic performance from a global comparative perspective. In this article, we argue that the cognitive ability of citizens to distinguish between democratic and authoritarian characteristics constitutes the individual yardstick for assessing democracy in practice. Furthermore, we expect that the effect of citizens’ democratic knowledge on their evaluation of democratic performance is moderated by the institutional level of democracy. We test these assumptions by combining data from the sixth and seventh wave of the World Values Survey and the third pre-release of the European Values Study 2017, resulting in 114 representative samples from 80 countries with 128,127 respondents. Applying multilevel regression modeling, we find that the higher a country’s level of democracy, the more positive the effect of democratic knowledge on citizens’ assessment of democratic performance. In contrast, we find that the lower the level of democracy in a country, the more negative the effect of citizens’ democratic knowledge on their evaluation of democracy. Thus, this study shows that citizens who are more knowledgeable about democracy are most cognitively able to assess the level of democracy in line with country-level measures of democracy. These results open up new theoretical and empirical perspectives for related research on support for and satisfaction with democracy as well as research on democratization.

Overselling democracy–claiming legitimacy? The link between democratic pretention, notions of democracy and citizens' evaluations of regimes' democraticness

“…In that case, different popular notions of democracy could not moderate whether governmental "overselling" leads people to inflationary or deflationary ratings of their regimes' democratic legitimacy due to a lack of variance within countries . As there are many alternative explanations for satisfaction with democracy (see e.g., Claassen, 2020b;Kriesi, 2020;Wegscheider and Stark, 2020), I do not deem these findings as a penultimate causal explanation of how "overselling" works, but rather as highly relevant and informative description of how "overselling" and notions of democracy interact in forming democracy evaluations of citizens. The findings help to better understand, how and why seemingly authoritarian propaganda falls on fertile ground and why some populations reach a tipping point which makes them doubt their "overselling" governments and demand true democratic procedures.…”

“…However, democratic experience can help overcome misunderstandings and long exposure to democratic institutions can engender the acculturation of democratic values (Mishler and Rose, 2002). Better knowledge of democracy also helps citizens to evaluate their countries levels of democracy more precisely (Wegscheider and Stark, 2020), while general support for democracy can speed up democratic consolidation and de-stabilize autocratic rule (Claassen, 2020a). From a political culture perspective, the elimination of existential threats and societal and economic modernization have been found to enable individuals and societies to move from survival to selfexpression and emancipative values and subsequently drive demand for political change (Inglehart and Appel, 1989;Welzel et al, 2003;Welzel, 2013;Brunkert et al, 2019).…”

Quality of Democracy Makes a Difference, but Not for Everyone: How Political Interest, Education, and Conceptions of Democracy Condition the Relationship Between Democratic Quality and Political Trust

“…Testing for the moderating effect of conceptions of democracy, he finds that both macro-level impartiality and individual-level democratic performance evaluations play a larger role in shaping political trust for citizens who understand democracy in primarily procedural terms. Investigating the link between what they call "democratic knowledge" and citizens' evaluations of democratic performance, Wegscheider and Stark (2020) demonstrate that citizens who consider only democratic (instead of autocratic) principles as essential characteristics of democracy-i.e. hold a conception of democracy that comes closer to its scholarly definition-evaluate their own country's democratic performance more positively in more democratic countries and more negatively in more authoritarian countries.…”

Challenges in conceptualizing and measuring meanings and understandings of democracy

“…First, it provides some considerations for combining research strategies and conceptual approaches to position the studies in the debate on the meanings and understanding of democracy. Second, all contributions deal with different aspects of the challenges mentioned above, as they discuss theoretical questions on conceptualization, expand knowledge about survey research by offering new theory-based conceptualizations based on new (Baniamin 2020) and existing (Wegscheider and Stark 2020) items. In addition to the use of qualitative interviews (Frankenberger and Buhr 2020), they introduce new methodological approaches from psychology (Osterberg-Kaufmann and Stadelmaier 2020) and linguistics (Dahlberg et al 2020) which underlines the importance of interdisciplinary research.…”

“…Carsten Wegscheider and Toralf Stark (2020), the authors of the second contribution, also address the individual evaluation of democratic performance. In contrast to Baniamin, however, the authors argue that a valid assessment of democracy performance depends above all on citizens' knowledge of democracy and the country's level of democracy.…”