Culture and Regimes: The Democratizing Force of Emancipative Values
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Culture and Regimes: The
Democratizing Force of Emancipative
Values
CHRISTIAN WELZEL
Abstract
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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.
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INTRODUCTION
Almond and Verba (1963, p. 498), in unison with Eckstein (1966, p. 1), introduced the term congruence, claiming that political regimes become stable only
in so far as their authority patterns meet a population’s firmly encultured
authority beliefs. According to the congruence thesis, authoritarian regimes
are stable when people idolize strong leaders who rule with an iron fist, just
as democratic regimes are stable when people believe that political authority
ought to be subject to horizontal checks and public consent.
Inglehart and Welzel (2005, p. 187) extended these propositions to show
that encultured authority beliefs explain “democratic backsliding” and
autocratization in regimes that temporarily climbed to higher levels of
democracy than the population’s prevalent value orientations support.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert A. Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
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Culture also explains the resilience of authoritarianism in regimes in which
autocratic power concentration is congruent with most people’s normative
expectations. Finally, culture explains transitions toward and the subsequent
sustenance of democracy among populations that came to firmly believe in
democratic principles, particularly universal freedoms.
THE CENTRALITY OF EMANCIPATIVE VALUES
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Much of the political culture literature considers explicit popular preferences for democracy to be an indication of a public’s genuine demand
for democracy (Bratton, Mattes, & Gymiah-Boadi, 2005). However, recent
evidence questions the presumption that most people express approval of
the word “democracy” out of a genuine appreciation of the freedoms that
define democracy in liberal thought (Welzel, 2013, Chapter 10).
So how can we know that people support democracy out of a firm belief
in its defining freedoms? Democracy is an emancipatory achievement
that frees people from oppression and discrimination and empowers
them “to live the lives they have reason to value” (Sen, 1999). Thus, the
values motivating democracy emphasize equality, liberty, tolerance, and
empowering people to govern themselves, in both private and public
life. People who value these goals over others emphasize “emancipative
values” (Welzel, 2013). These people understand democracy accurately as a
system that grants freedoms and they support it for this reason, and not as
a means to other ends, such as prosperity. They also don’t misunderstand
democracy as something that contradicts the very definition of democracy,
like strongman rule. Hence, it is emancipative values and not the explicit
avowal of the word “democracy” that shapes a population’s true affinity
to democracy. In accordance with this conclusion, Welzel (2013, Chapter 8)
provides compelling evidence showing that how firmly emancipative
values are encultured in a population has far greater predictive power
over the actual democratic quality of the respective regime than has the
proportion of the population expressing an explicit endorsement of the
word “democracy.”
MEASURING EMANCIPATIVE VALUES
Using public opinion data from more than a hundred countries covered
by the World Values Surveys, Welzel (2013, Chapter 2) explains how to
measure emancipative values. The index of emancipative values is an
additive summary over a total of 12 survey items, which touch on four
domains of human emancipation, namely an emphasis on child autonomy,
gender equality, sexual self-determination, and popular voice. Overall, this
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index measures support for freedom of choice and equality of opportunities, which combines a libertarian with an egalitarian element into an
emancipatory orientation. Index scores range from a theoretical minimum
of 0 when a respondent takes the least emancipatory position on all 12
items to a maximum of 1.0 when she or he takes the most emancipatory
position on all items. Decimal fractions of 1 indicate intermediate positions.
To estimate how firmly encultured these emancipative values are in a given
country-population, Welzel calculates the arithmetic sample mean on this
emancipative values index.
Assigning each national population a single score for emancipative
values glosses over inner-societal variation. National cultures exhibit no
monolithic mentality; they are, instead, divided by inner-societal cleavages.
Nevertheless, it is possible to identify where the bulk of a population is
positioned on emancipation. The arithmetic mean is the best representative
of a national culture’s central tendency in this regard, which is manifest in
the fact that country-wise distributions on the index of emancipative values
show strongly mean-clustered, single-peaked shapes for each national
population. Furthermore, even though national populations differ internally
over emancipative values along such cleavage lines as age, gender, social
class, ethnicity and religious denomination, these inner-national differences
are far smaller than the mean-level differences between nations. The power
of nations to cluster the orientations of their people reflects the power of
culture to homogenize people within cultural boundaries and to diversify
them across these boundaries. In light of this evidence, it is justifiable to use
country-wise population means as an indication of how firmly encultured
emancipative values are in the respective society.
Some scholars criticize the concept of emancipative values because the
index components do not always appear to be interchangeable reflections
of a single underlying dimension (Aléman & Woods, 2016; Sokolov 2018).
This criticism only considers the “dimensional” logic of index construction
and, thus, overlooks the alternative logic, which is also valid: the “combinatory” logic. In the combinatory logic, it is the additive presence of a
construct’s components that accounts for the construct’s consequences,
irrespective of how cohesive the construct’s constituents are in a country.
Indeed, Welzel and Inglehart (2016) show that the effects of emancipative
values are insensitive to cross-country variability in these values’ inter-item
cohesion. This cohesion can be anything from weak to strong, but this
variability leaves unaffected the items’ combined effects, which speaks
to “compositional substitutability”: an index’s combined functioning is
insensitive to variability in its single constituents’ salience, strength, and
cohesion. Whenever this is the case, an index is valid in combinatory
logic.
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REGIME LEGITIMACY MISUNDERSTOOD
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Cross-national surveys show that large majorities of people around the
world support democracy, no matter in what type of regime they live.
Often, these majorities are larger in autocracies than in democracies,
including 90% of the population and more (Norris, 2011). Many scholars
interpret these numbers as evidence that the freedoms inherent in liberal
democracy represent a universal human desire and that these desires are
felt the most where people lack their realization the most (Maseland &
van Hoorn, 2012). This interpretation presumes that autocratic regimes are
almost always illegitimate in the eyes of their people and persist despite
this illegitimacy because of their ability to suppress dissenting majorities,
no matter how large these majorities are. The same interpretation also
presumes that people who express support for democracy in an autocracy
understand democracy accurately as the penultimate alternative to their
type of government.
However, recent evidence proves each of these presumptions fundamentally wrong. Whether people express support for democracy out of
a genuine commitment to democracy’s defining freedoms is evident in
emancipative values because they address these freedoms. And since
emancipative values vary massively across this world’s cultures, the
desire for democratic freedoms is not universally human but culturally
conditioned, with emancipative values being the most important condition. Indeed, where emancipative values remain weak, most people
misunderstand democracy in authoritarian ways, namely as the rule of
“wise” leaders to which people owe obedience because the rulers’ wisdom guides them to govern in the best of all people’s interest (Welzel
& Kirsch, 2018). It is noteworthy in this context that most autocracies in
the world, including some of the most repressive ones, depict themselves
as democratic in their propaganda. The typical narrative is to denounce
Western democracy as a perversion of “true” democracy, which is then redefined as some form of guardianship under terms such as guided, managed,
sovereign, or socialist democracy. As long as emancipative values remain
weak, ordinary people lack the moral strength to resist this authoritarian
indoctrination and believe in it, visible in what Welzel and Kirsch (2018)
have unmasked as authoritarian notions of democracy. In line with these
authoritarian notions, people misperceive their regimes as democratic when
in fact they are autocratic (Kruse, Ravlik, & Welzel, 2017). This pattern
as well maps strongly on emancipative values, which need to be strong
to turn people against authoritarian misunderstandings of democracy.
All this evidence supports a fundamental revision of our interpretation
of support for democracy in autocracies: coupled with authoritarian
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notions of democracy, support for democracy reverts its meaning into
its own contradiction: support for autocracy, that is (Welzel & Inglehart,
2018).
The alternative interpretation is to posit that people in autocracies express
authoritarian notions of democracy to hide their alternative regime preference for democracy. This assumption, however, is highly implausible in light
of the data. If people’s first concern was to hide an alternative regime preference for democracy, they should avoid expressing support for democracy to
begin with. In fact, however, people express support for democracy in autocracies no less than in democracies. Thus, support for democracy is rather a
constant than a variable. What really varies is the notions of democracy and
the values that inspire them.
Political scientists argue since long that different types of regimes successfully instrumentalize schools, the media, and other socialization agents to
instill in people the values that fit the regime’s underlying norms. These
are forms of cultural manipulation that operate against emancipative values, which autocratic elites fight because the spirit of these values undermines the obedience that autocracy needs to function. Openly disqualifying emancipative values as bound to the West and, thus, alien to a country’s national culture serves the purpose of cementing an anti-Western identity that shields people from the appeal of emancipative values. Breeding
national, ethnic and religious sentiments and other forms of parochial identities are part of this psychological game. Hence, autocratic regimes tend to
nurture an anti-emancipative culture of national exceptionalism or suprematism that fit their authoritarian norms. Some authors take this insight to
suggest that emancipative values can only mature in democracies (Hadenius
& Teorell, 2005).
THE EMANCIPATORY IMPULSE OF ACTION RESOURCES
At first glance, the assumption that regime features shape emancipative values seems to be accurate. Indeed, regime characteristics, such as the level
of state repression and the scope of democratic freedoms, show a systematic relationship with the spread of emancipative values in a country, at least
before proper controls: The lower the level of state repression and the wider
the scope of democratic freedoms are, the more widespread emancipative
values tend to be (Welzel, 2013, Chapter 8).
Yet, the direct impact of regime characteristics on emancipative values
drops drastically in both strength and significance once one takes “action
resources” into account. Action resources include (i) material means, like
food, shelter, household equipment, and monetary incomes that improve
people’s living standard and enhance their economic power. Action
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resources include (ii) intellectual skills deriving from information, education,
and knowledge, all of which improve people’s reasoning capacity, including
their ability to think for themselves and to empathize with unfamiliar others.
Action resources include (iii) connective opportunities, which multiply with
urban density and the modern means of transportation and communication,
thus enhancing people’s possibilities to touch base with like-minded others
for a joint purpose (Welzel, 2013, Chapter 1).
Action resources in this sense pervasively change the human condition,
transforming life from a source of coercive pressures that dictate one’s
actions into a source of opportunities to pursue a purpose of one’s choice.
This coercion-to-opportunity turn in the nature of human existence started
out in a handful of Western societies with the Industrial Revolution but is
now rapidly expanding into most of the world through globalization. This
sea change in the nature of life, which Welzel (2013) describes as human
emancipation, is a true novelty in the history of our species.
Indeed, until 200 years ago human existence was almost always and
everywhere precarious, entrapped in a constant struggle against famine,
pestilence, and violence. But with the growth of action resources among
ordinary people in modern times, the individual person gains profoundly
in agency because action resources empower people to pursue a purpose
of their choice. Hence, there is a liberating impulse in modernity as it frees
individuals from perennial existential constraints. To the extent to which this
liberating impulse affects the lives of wide population segments, modernity
also has an equalizing impulse that closes the power gap between the masses
and the elite. The invention and spread of modern-day democracy is the
institutional tribute to this groundbreaking shift in societal power structures
(Pinker 2017).
From the viewpoint of the mass-elite power balance, it is important to note
that greater action resources in the hands of ordinary people also means
greater resources of collective action. In other words, when people are more
capable to pursue a purpose of their choice, this capability gain also includes
shared purposes for which people join forces on a voluntary basis. These
changes strengthen civil society and social movements vis-à-vis the state.
Hence, growing action resources in the hands of ordinary people infuse
societies with greater self-coordinating capacities, including the capacity
to organize effective resistance against oppressive elites (Welzel, 2013,
Chapter 7).
The nature of life varies on a continuum from coercive pressures, at one
polar end, to opportunities for choice at the opposite end. Intimately related,
human mentalities vary on a continuum from preventive closure, at one
extreme end, to promotive openness at the other. Variation on this continuum
evolved as a psychological adaptation to objective living conditions (Welzel,
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2014). When life circumstances change in similar fashion for the bulk of a
population, we see these psychological adaptations operate on the level of
entire national mentalities, with shifting central tendencies in a population’s
dominant orientations. These adaptations keep human mentalities in touch
with reality, which is essential to our species’ survival and well-being.
Furthermore, the adaptability of mentalities allows for the natural evolution
of moral systems. For this reason, technological progress has been followed
by a moral progression toward emancipative values (Alexander, Inglehart,
& Welzel, 2015). In fact, the strength and spread of emancipative values
in a society tells one where on the continuum from preventive closure to
promotive openness the collective mentality of the respective population is
located: Weaker emancipative values indicate a position closer to preventive
closure; stronger emancipative values indicate a position closer to promotive
openness.
For these reasons, emancipative values evolve in close association with
action resources, which shift life circumstances from constraints to opportunities (Alexander et al., 2015). There is nothing particularly Western about
emancipative values from this point of view: Emancipative values are most
widespread in Western societies not because these societies are Western
but because they have experienced the most massive growth of action
resources in the hands of ordinary people. Insofar as action resources grow
among the populations of non-Western countries, emancipative values are
emerging there as well. This is a natural mentality change. The reason is
that the key evolved gift of our species, intelligence, equips all members of
humankind with the potential to think for themselves. As soon as spreading
education, information and communication activate this potential, people
gain intellectual autonomy. As a direct consequence, people lose their need
for doctrinal guidance and they no longer wish to be told what to think and
what to do. In this moment, people begin to perceive unchecked authority as
arrogated rather than legitimate, which inevitably makes them find appeal
in emancipative values.
Logically, to the extent to which action resources and the related life
opportunities distribute unequally across different population segments,
emancipative values progress in a socially layered manner: Their rise is
least pronounced among lower-class segments in which people command
lesser action resources and, accordingly, live in greater existential insecurity.
Thus, social inequality in action resources leads to social polarization over
emancipative values, with those “left behind” finding appeal in populist
ideologies that advocate a backlash of cultural values. Recent electoral
triumphs of right-wing populism, from Brexit to Trump, illustrate this
pattern (Alexander & Welzel, 2017).
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THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTIPODES OF EMANCIPATIVE VALUES
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Emancipative values need to be seen in the context of their direct psychological antipodes, three of which are of particular importance. Since
emancipative values embody a cosmopolitan orientation, the three antipodes
each incorporate the exact opposite: a parochial orientation. The antipodes
I have in mind are familism, religiosity, and nationalism, or more precisely
supremacist versions of these orientations, which stylize the own clan, the
own religion, and the own nation as inherently superior to others (Alexander
et al., 2015). Familism, religiosity, and nationalism are parochial in the sense
that they establish an impermeable “us-and-them” separation that sustains
exclusionary group identities with the purpose to limit solidarity to the
in-group. Authoritarianism, fundamentalism, and nativist populism all
appeal to these parochial “we first” orientations. These appeals are powerful
because they directly address a tribal instinct—the instinct to turn back
to preventive closure when we perceive a threat linked to a recognizable
out-group. Where these parochial orientations persist, emancipative values
cannot flourish. In fact, they can even revert. These are the situations
in which authoritarianism can persist and when democratic backsliding
becomes more likely. Conversely, however, when action resources diffuse
so widely and equally that group boundaries lose their salience, parochial
orientations lose their appeal, and the identity shield against emancipative
values begins to erode.
THE “TECTONIC MODEL” OF REGIME CHANGE AND STABILITY
Emancipative values change at a glacial pace, growing in small increments.
Over recent decades, these moves have been, for the most part, progressive.
The key defining feature of liberal democracy—civic entitlements—also
evolved, for the most part, progressively, albeit in sudden disruptive shifts
(Welzel, 2013, Chapter 4). The joint progression of both emancipative values
and civic entitlements reflects a co-evolutionary dynamic that sustains a
strong correlation between both variables at each temporal cross-section. But
is it possible to identify the driver in the progressive parallelism between
these two variables when one of them proceeds incrementally and the other
disruptively? The “emancipatory theory of regime change and stability”
by Welzel, Inglehart, and Kruse (2015) formulates testable predictions to
this end.
In phrasing these predictions, the authors conceptualize the relationship
between emancipative values and civic entitlements as a supply–demand
linkage with respect to democratic freedoms. In this relationship, civic
entitlements constitute the elite-side supply of democratic freedoms, while
emancipative values constitute the mass-side demand for them. Since
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demands change glacially through continuous incremental steps, while
supplies change disruptively through rare sudden jumps, Welzel, Inglehart,
and Kruse summarize their co-evolutionary dynamic as what they call the
“tectonic model” of regime change: Incrementally changing demands build
up an accruing tension with stagnant supplies, until this tension releases
through a sudden disruptive shift that brings the supplies back into equilibrium with the demands. Accordingly, the direction and scope of regime
change operates as a correction of the supply’s initial misfit to the demand.
To confirm these propositions empirically, three distinct regularities must
show up in observational data:
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1. Where the elite-side supply of freedoms falls short of the mass-side
demand, an occurring regime change shifts the supply upward—to
the extent to which the supply previously fell short of the demand.
In this case, we observe transitions toward democracy or, in short,
democratization.
2. Where the elite-side supply of freedoms exceeds the mass-side demand,
an occurring regime change shifts the supply downward—to the
extent to which the supply previously exceeded the demand. In this
scenario, we witness transitions away from democracy or, in short,
autocratization.
3. Where the elite-side supply of freedoms fits the mass-side demand for
them, no regime change occurs and the supply stays where it was. This is
the case of regime stability, which can be either democratic or autocratic
stability.
Political science knows separate explanations of (i) the emergence of
democracies, (ii) the breakdown of democracies and their recession into
autocracies, (iii) the survival of democracies, and (iv) the stability of
autocracies. Yet, all these explanations co-exist rather isolated from each
other. In fact, several authors argue that the causes of these various aspects
of regime stability and regime change are different in kind and largely
incomparable. Against this backdrop, it is an outstanding feature of the
“tectonic model” that it unifies explanations of the two opposite versions of
regime change—democratization and autocratization—as well as the two
opposite forms of regime stability—democratic and autocratic stability—in
a single theory. This single theory provides a unified framework to understand regime stability and regime change, based on a unitary principle:
the direction and degree of incongruence between regime institutions and
cultural values.
Now, to test whether observed data support the “tectonic model,” one
must map regime changes occurring within a defined time window on
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the supply–demand misfits present at the opening of this time window.
Welzel et al.’s (2015) regression analyses, depicted in Figures 2 and 3 of their
article, demonstrate exactly these points for almost a hundred countries
from all over the globe, including more than 90% of the world population.
Indeed, between 1980 and 2010, countries like Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and
Venezuela starting out with freedom supplies largely exceeding freedom
demands in 1980 experienced a corresponding supply drop by 2010. These
are cases of autocratization. Conversely, countries like Chile, Slovenia and
Taiwan starting out with freedom supplies far short of demands in 1980
experienced a corresponding supply jump by 2010. Finally, countries with
supplies starting out at equilibrium with demands in 1980 experienced
little shift in supply by 2010. The latter pattern is typical for most Western
countries, which sustained a democratic equilibrium, as well as for most
Middle Eastern countries, which sustained an autocratic equilibrium over
this period. Overall, the direction and scope of the supply–demand misfit
explains a highly significant 57% of the entire cross-national variation in the
direction and scope of regime changes, toward and away from democracy.
Since regime stability is merely the inverse of regime change, the model also
explains the former, and it does so equally well for both democracies and
autocracies.
Putting things together, the direction and scope of regime change operate
largely as a function of the regimes’ initial misfit with their surrounding culture, in striking confirmation of the “tectonic model” of regime change. Still,
the relationship between emancipative values and civic entitlements could be
reciprocal, such that values also change in response to their initial misfit to the
regimes’ democratic quality: Values could be over-emancipative when they
score higher than the regime’s scope of civic entitlements suggests. Or they
could be under-emancipative when they score lower than the regime’s scope
of civic entitlements suggests. Now, if regimes—merely by means of their
presence—instill congruent values into people, emancipative values would
change as a function of their misfit with the regime’s civic entitlements: Initially, over-emancipative values subsequently turn less emancipative, at the
same time as initially under-emancipative values subsequently turn more
emancipative. The analyses by Welzel et al. (2015) conclusively disprove this
interpretation. Indeed, people’s values have mostly turned more emancipative, regardless of whether or not they misfitted the regime’s civic entitlements in a previous period.
FURTHER EVIDENCE
The conceptual diagram in Figure 1 places emancipative values center
stage in Welzel’s encompassing theory of human emancipation. This theory
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Material
resources
Connective
resources
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Utility
valuation
Human emancipation:
Value
codification
The licence
to freedoms
Political
participation
rights
The value
of freedoms
Personal
autonomy
rights
Civic entitlements:
Guarantees to pursue purposes of one’s choice
(Institutional empowerment)
Valuation of
equal
opportunities
Emancipative values:
Motivations to pursue purposes of one’s choice
(Psychological empowerment)
Valuation of
independent
choice
Institutional regulations
PSYHB etrds0454.tex
Figure 1 Societal progress as human emancipation. Source: Reprint of Figure 1.1 in Welzel (2013, p. 44), by permission of the
author, see: www.cambridge.org/9781107664838.
Extent to which people are capable, motivated, and entitled to pursue purposes of their choice
The utility
of freedoms
Action resources:
Capabilities to pursue purposes of one’s choice
(Existential empowerment)
Intellectual
resources
Psychological orientations
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Existential conditions
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identifies the core theme of societal progress as “human emancipation,”
which is the process by which (i) growing action resources, (ii) rising
emancipative values, and (iii) expanding civic entitlements work together in
enhancing ordinary people’s agency in pursuing purposes of their choice.
The theory of emancipation suggests a sequence in the co-evolution of its
three key ingredients such that (i) emancipative values rise in response to
growing action resources, while (ii) civic entitlements expand in response to
risen emancipative values and grown action resources.
Using information incorporated in the trend- and cohort-patterns of emancipative values, Welzel (2013, Chapter 4) estimated these values backward in
time all the way to 1940–1950 for about 80 countries worldwide that represent
more than 90% of the world population. Based on these estimates, Figure 2
documents the co-evolution of the three components of human emancipation, separately for the 10 culture zones in Welzel’s historically grounded
culture zone scheme. Three insights become clear from these diagrams: first,
the trend has been overwhelmingly progressive in each component of human
emancipation and this is true for the world as a whole; second, the components evolve tightly linked to each other, with emancipative values rising alongside action resources and civic entitlements following emancipative
values; third, Western cultures have been in the lead position and continue
to hold this position in the overall emancipatory dynamic.
CONCLUSION
Emancipative values are the most important aspect of political culture
concerning a population’s readiness for democracy. These values are not
a culture-bound product that belongs exclusively to the West. Instead,
emancipative values emerge as part of a broader process of human emancipation that evolves naturally as economic development places more action
resources into the hands of ordinary people. The desire to pursue a purpose
of one’s choice that inevitably emerges with emancipative values directs
people’s attention toward civic entitlements that guarantee freedom of
choice—which is the central theme of democracy. For these reasons, emancipative values provide the key selective force in the evolution of political
regimes. The resulting selective pressures operate in favor of democracy
because emancipative values build the grassroots motivations that channel
mass support toward pro-democratic actors and away from anti-democratic
ones. This makes it increasingly likely that regime conflicts end in favor of
democracy and in disfavor of autocracies once emancipative values have
become sufficiently widespread.
By the same token, however, democracy remains a fragile achievement
that is in danger of backsliding where emancipative values are weak.
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Figure 2 Societal progress as human emancipation. Source: Reprint of Figure 4.5 in Welzel (2013, p. 160), by permission of the
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Sharp inner-societal divisions over people’s access to action resources and
the life opportunities attached to these resources constitute the single-most
important cause behind the parochialisms embedded in familism, religiosity,
and nationalism that block emancipative values.
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. Future research would be well advised to measure
emancipative values in more nuanced ways and to study in greater detail
these values’ drivers and the dynamics by which they transgress cultural
boundaries or stop short of them. A promising new route of research includes
survey experiments, using exposure to authoritarian indoctrinations as a randomized treatment, to figure out how strongly people’s resistance against
such manipulations depends on their adherence to emancipative values and
to see how value-induced resistance strength interacts with personality traits
and the overall prevalence of emancipative values in a person’s reference
group.
REFERENCES
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Aléman, J., & Woods, D. (2016). Value orientations from the world values survey.
Comparative Political Studies, 48, 1–25.
Alexander, A. C., Inglehart, R., & Welzel, C. (2015). Emancipating sexuality: Breakthroughs into a bulwark of tradition. Social Indicators Research, 102, 1–27.
Alexander, A., & Welzel, C. (2017). The myth of de-consolidation: Rising liberalism and the populist reaction. Journal of Democracy, 28 (online debate forum:
http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles-files/foa-mounk-exchange/alexa
nder-welzel).
Almond, G. A., & Verba, S. (1963). The civic culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bratton, M., Mattes, R., & Gymiah-Boadi, E. (2005). Public opinion, democracy, and market reform in Africa. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Eckstein, H. (1966). A theory of stable democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Hadenius, A., & Teorell, J. (2005). Cultural and economic prerequisites of democracy.
Studies in Comparative International Development, 39, 87–106.
Inglehart, R., & Welzel, C. (2005). Modernization, cultural change, and democracy. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Kruse, S., Ravlik, M., & Welzel, C. (2017). The legitimacy puzzle: Why so many people
confuse the absence of democracy with its presence. World Values Research, 9, 1–30.
Maseland, R., & van Hoorn, A. (2012). Why Muslims like democracy yet have so little
of it. Public Choice, 147, 481–497.
Norris, P. (2011). Democratic deficit. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Pinker, S. (2017). Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and
Progress. New York: Viking.
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Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. New York, NY: Knopf.
Sokolov, B. (2018). The Index of Emancipative Values: Measurement Model Misspecification. American Political Science Review, 113, 1–14 (doi: 10.1017/S0003055417
000624).
Welzel, C. (2013). Freedom rising: Human empowerment and the quest for emancipation.
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Welzel, C. (2014). Evolution, empowerment and emancipation: How societies climb
the freedom ladder. World Development, 64, 33–51.
Welzel, C., & Inglehart, R. (2016). Misconceptions of measurement equivalence: Time
for a paradigm shift. Comparative Political Studies, 49, 1068–1094.
Welzel, C., & Inglehart, R. (2018). Political culture, mass beliefs and value change. In
C. Haerpfer, P. Bernhagen, R. F. Inglehart & C. Welzel (Eds.), Democratization (2nd
ed. (fully revised and updated)). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Welzel, C., Inglehart, R., & Kruse, S. (2015). Pitfalls in the study of democratization:
Testing the emancipatory theory of democracy. British Journal of Political Science,
46, 1–10.
Welzel, C. & H. Kirsch (2018). Democracy misunderstood: Authoritarian notions of democracy around the globe (V-Dem User Working Papers No. 15: 1–83). Available online
at https://www.v-dem
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Member of the German Academy of Sciences, Christian Welzel
(cwelzel@gmail.com) is the political culture research professor at Leuphana
University in Lunenburg, Germany. He is also president (emer.) and vice
president of the World Values Survey Association and chief foreign director
of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR) at the National
Research University-Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg and
Moscow, Russia. Welzel’s research focuses on human empowerment, emancipative values, cultural change, and democratization. Recipient of multiple
large-scale grants, Welzel is the author of more than a hundred-and-fifty
scholarly publications. Besides his award-winning Freedom Rising (2013
at CUP, winner of the Alexander George Award and the Stein Rokkan Prize),
the most recent books include Democratization (with Christian Haerpfer,
Ronald Inglehart and Patrick Bernhagen, 2nd fully revised and updated
edition at OUP 2018), The Civic Culture Transformed (with Russell J. Dalton, at
CUP 2014); and Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy (with Ronald
Inglehart, 2005 at CUP). Funded by the German Science Foundation’s
Reinhart Koselleck Award, Welzel currently directs research on the project
“The Cool Water Effect: The Geo-Climatic Origin of Western Civilization’s
Emancipatory Dynamic.”
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Identity-Based Motivation (Psychology), Daphna Oyserman
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Setting One’s Mind on Action: Planning Out Goal Striving in Advance (Psychology), Peter M. Gollwitzer
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Culture and Regimes: The
Democratizing Force of Emancipative
Values
CHRISTIAN WELZEL
Abstract
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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.
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INTRODUCTION
Almond and Verba (1963, p. 498), in unison with Eckstein (1966, p. 1), introduced the term congruence, claiming that political regimes become stable only
in so far as their authority patterns meet a population’s firmly encultured
authority beliefs. According to the congruence thesis, authoritarian regimes
are stable when people idolize strong leaders who rule with an iron fist, just
as democratic regimes are stable when people believe that political authority
ought to be subject to horizontal checks and public consent.
Inglehart and Welzel (2005, p. 187) extended these propositions to show
that encultured authority beliefs explain “democratic backsliding” and
autocratization in regimes that temporarily climbed to higher levels of
democracy than the population’s prevalent value orientations support.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert A. Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
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Culture also explains the resilience of authoritarianism in regimes in which
autocratic power concentration is congruent with most people’s normative
expectations. Finally, culture explains transitions toward and the subsequent
sustenance of democracy among populations that came to firmly believe in
democratic principles, particularly universal freedoms.
THE CENTRALITY OF EMANCIPATIVE VALUES
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Much of the political culture literature considers explicit popular preferences for democracy to be an indication of a public’s genuine demand
for democracy (Bratton, Mattes, & Gymiah-Boadi, 2005). However, recent
evidence questions the presumption that most people express approval of
the word “democracy” out of a genuine appreciation of the freedoms that
define democracy in liberal thought (Welzel, 2013, Chapter 10).
So how can we know that people support democracy out of a firm belief
in its defining freedoms? Democracy is an emancipatory achievement
that frees people from oppression and discrimination and empowers
them “to live the lives they have reason to value” (Sen, 1999). Thus, the
values motivating democracy emphasize equality, liberty, tolerance, and
empowering people to govern themselves, in both private and public
life. People who value these goals over others emphasize “emancipative
values” (Welzel, 2013). These people understand democracy accurately as a
system that grants freedoms and they support it for this reason, and not as
a means to other ends, such as prosperity. They also don’t misunderstand
democracy as something that contradicts the very definition of democracy,
like strongman rule. Hence, it is emancipative values and not the explicit
avowal of the word “democracy” that shapes a population’s true affinity
to democracy. In accordance with this conclusion, Welzel (2013, Chapter 8)
provides compelling evidence showing that how firmly emancipative
values are encultured in a population has far greater predictive power
over the actual democratic quality of the respective regime than has the
proportion of the population expressing an explicit endorsement of the
word “democracy.”
MEASURING EMANCIPATIVE VALUES
Using public opinion data from more than a hundred countries covered
by the World Values Surveys, Welzel (2013, Chapter 2) explains how to
measure emancipative values. The index of emancipative values is an
additive summary over a total of 12 survey items, which touch on four
domains of human emancipation, namely an emphasis on child autonomy,
gender equality, sexual self-determination, and popular voice. Overall, this
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index measures support for freedom of choice and equality of opportunities, which combines a libertarian with an egalitarian element into an
emancipatory orientation. Index scores range from a theoretical minimum
of 0 when a respondent takes the least emancipatory position on all 12
items to a maximum of 1.0 when she or he takes the most emancipatory
position on all items. Decimal fractions of 1 indicate intermediate positions.
To estimate how firmly encultured these emancipative values are in a given
country-population, Welzel calculates the arithmetic sample mean on this
emancipative values index.
Assigning each national population a single score for emancipative
values glosses over inner-societal variation. National cultures exhibit no
monolithic mentality; they are, instead, divided by inner-societal cleavages.
Nevertheless, it is possible to identify where the bulk of a population is
positioned on emancipation. The arithmetic mean is the best representative
of a national culture’s central tendency in this regard, which is manifest in
the fact that country-wise distributions on the index of emancipative values
show strongly mean-clustered, single-peaked shapes for each national
population. Furthermore, even though national populations differ internally
over emancipative values along such cleavage lines as age, gender, social
class, ethnicity and religious denomination, these inner-national differences
are far smaller than the mean-level differences between nations. The power
of nations to cluster the orientations of their people reflects the power of
culture to homogenize people within cultural boundaries and to diversify
them across these boundaries. In light of this evidence, it is justifiable to use
country-wise population means as an indication of how firmly encultured
emancipative values are in the respective society.
Some scholars criticize the concept of emancipative values because the
index components do not always appear to be interchangeable reflections
of a single underlying dimension (Aléman & Woods, 2016; Sokolov 2018).
This criticism only considers the “dimensional” logic of index construction
and, thus, overlooks the alternative logic, which is also valid: the “combinatory” logic. In the combinatory logic, it is the additive presence of a
construct’s components that accounts for the construct’s consequences,
irrespective of how cohesive the construct’s constituents are in a country.
Indeed, Welzel and Inglehart (2016) show that the effects of emancipative
values are insensitive to cross-country variability in these values’ inter-item
cohesion. This cohesion can be anything from weak to strong, but this
variability leaves unaffected the items’ combined effects, which speaks
to “compositional substitutability”: an index’s combined functioning is
insensitive to variability in its single constituents’ salience, strength, and
cohesion. Whenever this is the case, an index is valid in combinatory
logic.
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REGIME LEGITIMACY MISUNDERSTOOD
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Cross-national surveys show that large majorities of people around the
world support democracy, no matter in what type of regime they live.
Often, these majorities are larger in autocracies than in democracies,
including 90% of the population and more (Norris, 2011). Many scholars
interpret these numbers as evidence that the freedoms inherent in liberal
democracy represent a universal human desire and that these desires are
felt the most where people lack their realization the most (Maseland &
van Hoorn, 2012). This interpretation presumes that autocratic regimes are
almost always illegitimate in the eyes of their people and persist despite
this illegitimacy because of their ability to suppress dissenting majorities,
no matter how large these majorities are. The same interpretation also
presumes that people who express support for democracy in an autocracy
understand democracy accurately as the penultimate alternative to their
type of government.
However, recent evidence proves each of these presumptions fundamentally wrong. Whether people express support for democracy out of
a genuine commitment to democracy’s defining freedoms is evident in
emancipative values because they address these freedoms. And since
emancipative values vary massively across this world’s cultures, the
desire for democratic freedoms is not universally human but culturally
conditioned, with emancipative values being the most important condition. Indeed, where emancipative values remain weak, most people
misunderstand democracy in authoritarian ways, namely as the rule of
“wise” leaders to which people owe obedience because the rulers’ wisdom guides them to govern in the best of all people’s interest (Welzel
& Kirsch, 2018). It is noteworthy in this context that most autocracies in
the world, including some of the most repressive ones, depict themselves
as democratic in their propaganda. The typical narrative is to denounce
Western democracy as a perversion of “true” democracy, which is then redefined as some form of guardianship under terms such as guided, managed,
sovereign, or socialist democracy. As long as emancipative values remain
weak, ordinary people lack the moral strength to resist this authoritarian
indoctrination and believe in it, visible in what Welzel and Kirsch (2018)
have unmasked as authoritarian notions of democracy. In line with these
authoritarian notions, people misperceive their regimes as democratic when
in fact they are autocratic (Kruse, Ravlik, & Welzel, 2017). This pattern
as well maps strongly on emancipative values, which need to be strong
to turn people against authoritarian misunderstandings of democracy.
All this evidence supports a fundamental revision of our interpretation
of support for democracy in autocracies: coupled with authoritarian
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notions of democracy, support for democracy reverts its meaning into
its own contradiction: support for autocracy, that is (Welzel & Inglehart,
2018).
The alternative interpretation is to posit that people in autocracies express
authoritarian notions of democracy to hide their alternative regime preference for democracy. This assumption, however, is highly implausible in light
of the data. If people’s first concern was to hide an alternative regime preference for democracy, they should avoid expressing support for democracy to
begin with. In fact, however, people express support for democracy in autocracies no less than in democracies. Thus, support for democracy is rather a
constant than a variable. What really varies is the notions of democracy and
the values that inspire them.
Political scientists argue since long that different types of regimes successfully instrumentalize schools, the media, and other socialization agents to
instill in people the values that fit the regime’s underlying norms. These
are forms of cultural manipulation that operate against emancipative values, which autocratic elites fight because the spirit of these values undermines the obedience that autocracy needs to function. Openly disqualifying emancipative values as bound to the West and, thus, alien to a country’s national culture serves the purpose of cementing an anti-Western identity that shields people from the appeal of emancipative values. Breeding
national, ethnic and religious sentiments and other forms of parochial identities are part of this psychological game. Hence, autocratic regimes tend to
nurture an anti-emancipative culture of national exceptionalism or suprematism that fit their authoritarian norms. Some authors take this insight to
suggest that emancipative values can only mature in democracies (Hadenius
& Teorell, 2005).
THE EMANCIPATORY IMPULSE OF ACTION RESOURCES
At first glance, the assumption that regime features shape emancipative values seems to be accurate. Indeed, regime characteristics, such as the level
of state repression and the scope of democratic freedoms, show a systematic relationship with the spread of emancipative values in a country, at least
before proper controls: The lower the level of state repression and the wider
the scope of democratic freedoms are, the more widespread emancipative
values tend to be (Welzel, 2013, Chapter 8).
Yet, the direct impact of regime characteristics on emancipative values
drops drastically in both strength and significance once one takes “action
resources” into account. Action resources include (i) material means, like
food, shelter, household equipment, and monetary incomes that improve
people’s living standard and enhance their economic power. Action
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resources include (ii) intellectual skills deriving from information, education,
and knowledge, all of which improve people’s reasoning capacity, including
their ability to think for themselves and to empathize with unfamiliar others.
Action resources include (iii) connective opportunities, which multiply with
urban density and the modern means of transportation and communication,
thus enhancing people’s possibilities to touch base with like-minded others
for a joint purpose (Welzel, 2013, Chapter 1).
Action resources in this sense pervasively change the human condition,
transforming life from a source of coercive pressures that dictate one’s
actions into a source of opportunities to pursue a purpose of one’s choice.
This coercion-to-opportunity turn in the nature of human existence started
out in a handful of Western societies with the Industrial Revolution but is
now rapidly expanding into most of the world through globalization. This
sea change in the nature of life, which Welzel (2013) describes as human
emancipation, is a true novelty in the history of our species.
Indeed, until 200 years ago human existence was almost always and
everywhere precarious, entrapped in a constant struggle against famine,
pestilence, and violence. But with the growth of action resources among
ordinary people in modern times, the individual person gains profoundly
in agency because action resources empower people to pursue a purpose
of their choice. Hence, there is a liberating impulse in modernity as it frees
individuals from perennial existential constraints. To the extent to which this
liberating impulse affects the lives of wide population segments, modernity
also has an equalizing impulse that closes the power gap between the masses
and the elite. The invention and spread of modern-day democracy is the
institutional tribute to this groundbreaking shift in societal power structures
(Pinker 2017).
From the viewpoint of the mass-elite power balance, it is important to note
that greater action resources in the hands of ordinary people also means
greater resources of collective action. In other words, when people are more
capable to pursue a purpose of their choice, this capability gain also includes
shared purposes for which people join forces on a voluntary basis. These
changes strengthen civil society and social movements vis-à-vis the state.
Hence, growing action resources in the hands of ordinary people infuse
societies with greater self-coordinating capacities, including the capacity
to organize effective resistance against oppressive elites (Welzel, 2013,
Chapter 7).
The nature of life varies on a continuum from coercive pressures, at one
polar end, to opportunities for choice at the opposite end. Intimately related,
human mentalities vary on a continuum from preventive closure, at one
extreme end, to promotive openness at the other. Variation on this continuum
evolved as a psychological adaptation to objective living conditions (Welzel,
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2014). When life circumstances change in similar fashion for the bulk of a
population, we see these psychological adaptations operate on the level of
entire national mentalities, with shifting central tendencies in a population’s
dominant orientations. These adaptations keep human mentalities in touch
with reality, which is essential to our species’ survival and well-being.
Furthermore, the adaptability of mentalities allows for the natural evolution
of moral systems. For this reason, technological progress has been followed
by a moral progression toward emancipative values (Alexander, Inglehart,
& Welzel, 2015). In fact, the strength and spread of emancipative values
in a society tells one where on the continuum from preventive closure to
promotive openness the collective mentality of the respective population is
located: Weaker emancipative values indicate a position closer to preventive
closure; stronger emancipative values indicate a position closer to promotive
openness.
For these reasons, emancipative values evolve in close association with
action resources, which shift life circumstances from constraints to opportunities (Alexander et al., 2015). There is nothing particularly Western about
emancipative values from this point of view: Emancipative values are most
widespread in Western societies not because these societies are Western
but because they have experienced the most massive growth of action
resources in the hands of ordinary people. Insofar as action resources grow
among the populations of non-Western countries, emancipative values are
emerging there as well. This is a natural mentality change. The reason is
that the key evolved gift of our species, intelligence, equips all members of
humankind with the potential to think for themselves. As soon as spreading
education, information and communication activate this potential, people
gain intellectual autonomy. As a direct consequence, people lose their need
for doctrinal guidance and they no longer wish to be told what to think and
what to do. In this moment, people begin to perceive unchecked authority as
arrogated rather than legitimate, which inevitably makes them find appeal
in emancipative values.
Logically, to the extent to which action resources and the related life
opportunities distribute unequally across different population segments,
emancipative values progress in a socially layered manner: Their rise is
least pronounced among lower-class segments in which people command
lesser action resources and, accordingly, live in greater existential insecurity.
Thus, social inequality in action resources leads to social polarization over
emancipative values, with those “left behind” finding appeal in populist
ideologies that advocate a backlash of cultural values. Recent electoral
triumphs of right-wing populism, from Brexit to Trump, illustrate this
pattern (Alexander & Welzel, 2017).
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THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTIPODES OF EMANCIPATIVE VALUES
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Emancipative values need to be seen in the context of their direct psychological antipodes, three of which are of particular importance. Since
emancipative values embody a cosmopolitan orientation, the three antipodes
each incorporate the exact opposite: a parochial orientation. The antipodes
I have in mind are familism, religiosity, and nationalism, or more precisely
supremacist versions of these orientations, which stylize the own clan, the
own religion, and the own nation as inherently superior to others (Alexander
et al., 2015). Familism, religiosity, and nationalism are parochial in the sense
that they establish an impermeable “us-and-them” separation that sustains
exclusionary group identities with the purpose to limit solidarity to the
in-group. Authoritarianism, fundamentalism, and nativist populism all
appeal to these parochial “we first” orientations. These appeals are powerful
because they directly address a tribal instinct—the instinct to turn back
to preventive closure when we perceive a threat linked to a recognizable
out-group. Where these parochial orientations persist, emancipative values
cannot flourish. In fact, they can even revert. These are the situations
in which authoritarianism can persist and when democratic backsliding
becomes more likely. Conversely, however, when action resources diffuse
so widely and equally that group boundaries lose their salience, parochial
orientations lose their appeal, and the identity shield against emancipative
values begins to erode.
THE “TECTONIC MODEL” OF REGIME CHANGE AND STABILITY
Emancipative values change at a glacial pace, growing in small increments.
Over recent decades, these moves have been, for the most part, progressive.
The key defining feature of liberal democracy—civic entitlements—also
evolved, for the most part, progressively, albeit in sudden disruptive shifts
(Welzel, 2013, Chapter 4). The joint progression of both emancipative values
and civic entitlements reflects a co-evolutionary dynamic that sustains a
strong correlation between both variables at each temporal cross-section. But
is it possible to identify the driver in the progressive parallelism between
these two variables when one of them proceeds incrementally and the other
disruptively? The “emancipatory theory of regime change and stability”
by Welzel, Inglehart, and Kruse (2015) formulates testable predictions to
this end.
In phrasing these predictions, the authors conceptualize the relationship
between emancipative values and civic entitlements as a supply–demand
linkage with respect to democratic freedoms. In this relationship, civic
entitlements constitute the elite-side supply of democratic freedoms, while
emancipative values constitute the mass-side demand for them. Since
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demands change glacially through continuous incremental steps, while
supplies change disruptively through rare sudden jumps, Welzel, Inglehart,
and Kruse summarize their co-evolutionary dynamic as what they call the
“tectonic model” of regime change: Incrementally changing demands build
up an accruing tension with stagnant supplies, until this tension releases
through a sudden disruptive shift that brings the supplies back into equilibrium with the demands. Accordingly, the direction and scope of regime
change operates as a correction of the supply’s initial misfit to the demand.
To confirm these propositions empirically, three distinct regularities must
show up in observational data:
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1. Where the elite-side supply of freedoms falls short of the mass-side
demand, an occurring regime change shifts the supply upward—to
the extent to which the supply previously fell short of the demand.
In this case, we observe transitions toward democracy or, in short,
democratization.
2. Where the elite-side supply of freedoms exceeds the mass-side demand,
an occurring regime change shifts the supply downward—to the
extent to which the supply previously exceeded the demand. In this
scenario, we witness transitions away from democracy or, in short,
autocratization.
3. Where the elite-side supply of freedoms fits the mass-side demand for
them, no regime change occurs and the supply stays where it was. This is
the case of regime stability, which can be either democratic or autocratic
stability.
Political science knows separate explanations of (i) the emergence of
democracies, (ii) the breakdown of democracies and their recession into
autocracies, (iii) the survival of democracies, and (iv) the stability of
autocracies. Yet, all these explanations co-exist rather isolated from each
other. In fact, several authors argue that the causes of these various aspects
of regime stability and regime change are different in kind and largely
incomparable. Against this backdrop, it is an outstanding feature of the
“tectonic model” that it unifies explanations of the two opposite versions of
regime change—democratization and autocratization—as well as the two
opposite forms of regime stability—democratic and autocratic stability—in
a single theory. This single theory provides a unified framework to understand regime stability and regime change, based on a unitary principle:
the direction and degree of incongruence between regime institutions and
cultural values.
Now, to test whether observed data support the “tectonic model,” one
must map regime changes occurring within a defined time window on
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the supply–demand misfits present at the opening of this time window.
Welzel et al.’s (2015) regression analyses, depicted in Figures 2 and 3 of their
article, demonstrate exactly these points for almost a hundred countries
from all over the globe, including more than 90% of the world population.
Indeed, between 1980 and 2010, countries like Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and
Venezuela starting out with freedom supplies largely exceeding freedom
demands in 1980 experienced a corresponding supply drop by 2010. These
are cases of autocratization. Conversely, countries like Chile, Slovenia and
Taiwan starting out with freedom supplies far short of demands in 1980
experienced a corresponding supply jump by 2010. Finally, countries with
supplies starting out at equilibrium with demands in 1980 experienced
little shift in supply by 2010. The latter pattern is typical for most Western
countries, which sustained a democratic equilibrium, as well as for most
Middle Eastern countries, which sustained an autocratic equilibrium over
this period. Overall, the direction and scope of the supply–demand misfit
explains a highly significant 57% of the entire cross-national variation in the
direction and scope of regime changes, toward and away from democracy.
Since regime stability is merely the inverse of regime change, the model also
explains the former, and it does so equally well for both democracies and
autocracies.
Putting things together, the direction and scope of regime change operate
largely as a function of the regimes’ initial misfit with their surrounding culture, in striking confirmation of the “tectonic model” of regime change. Still,
the relationship between emancipative values and civic entitlements could be
reciprocal, such that values also change in response to their initial misfit to the
regimes’ democratic quality: Values could be over-emancipative when they
score higher than the regime’s scope of civic entitlements suggests. Or they
could be under-emancipative when they score lower than the regime’s scope
of civic entitlements suggests. Now, if regimes—merely by means of their
presence—instill congruent values into people, emancipative values would
change as a function of their misfit with the regime’s civic entitlements: Initially, over-emancipative values subsequently turn less emancipative, at the
same time as initially under-emancipative values subsequently turn more
emancipative. The analyses by Welzel et al. (2015) conclusively disprove this
interpretation. Indeed, people’s values have mostly turned more emancipative, regardless of whether or not they misfitted the regime’s civic entitlements in a previous period.
FURTHER EVIDENCE
The conceptual diagram in Figure 1 places emancipative values center
stage in Welzel’s encompassing theory of human emancipation. This theory
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Material
resources
Connective
resources
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Utility
valuation
Human emancipation:
Value
codification
The licence
to freedoms
Political
participation
rights
The value
of freedoms
Personal
autonomy
rights
Civic entitlements:
Guarantees to pursue purposes of one’s choice
(Institutional empowerment)
Valuation of
equal
opportunities
Emancipative values:
Motivations to pursue purposes of one’s choice
(Psychological empowerment)
Valuation of
independent
choice
Institutional regulations
PSYHB etrds0454.tex
Figure 1 Societal progress as human emancipation. Source: Reprint of Figure 1.1 in Welzel (2013, p. 44), by permission of the
author, see: www.cambridge.org/9781107664838.
Extent to which people are capable, motivated, and entitled to pursue purposes of their choice
The utility
of freedoms
Action resources:
Capabilities to pursue purposes of one’s choice
(Existential empowerment)
Intellectual
resources
Psychological orientations
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Existential conditions
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
identifies the core theme of societal progress as “human emancipation,”
which is the process by which (i) growing action resources, (ii) rising
emancipative values, and (iii) expanding civic entitlements work together in
enhancing ordinary people’s agency in pursuing purposes of their choice.
The theory of emancipation suggests a sequence in the co-evolution of its
three key ingredients such that (i) emancipative values rise in response to
growing action resources, while (ii) civic entitlements expand in response to
risen emancipative values and grown action resources.
Using information incorporated in the trend- and cohort-patterns of emancipative values, Welzel (2013, Chapter 4) estimated these values backward in
time all the way to 1940–1950 for about 80 countries worldwide that represent
more than 90% of the world population. Based on these estimates, Figure 2
documents the co-evolution of the three components of human emancipation, separately for the 10 culture zones in Welzel’s historically grounded
culture zone scheme. Three insights become clear from these diagrams: first,
the trend has been overwhelmingly progressive in each component of human
emancipation and this is true for the world as a whole; second, the components evolve tightly linked to each other, with emancipative values rising alongside action resources and civic entitlements following emancipative
values; third, Western cultures have been in the lead position and continue
to hold this position in the overall emancipatory dynamic.
CONCLUSION
Emancipative values are the most important aspect of political culture
concerning a population’s readiness for democracy. These values are not
a culture-bound product that belongs exclusively to the West. Instead,
emancipative values emerge as part of a broader process of human emancipation that evolves naturally as economic development places more action
resources into the hands of ordinary people. The desire to pursue a purpose
of one’s choice that inevitably emerges with emancipative values directs
people’s attention toward civic entitlements that guarantee freedom of
choice—which is the central theme of democracy. For these reasons, emancipative values provide the key selective force in the evolution of political
regimes. The resulting selective pressures operate in favor of democracy
because emancipative values build the grassroots motivations that channel
mass support toward pro-democratic actors and away from anti-democratic
ones. This makes it increasingly likely that regime conflicts end in favor of
democracy and in disfavor of autocracies once emancipative values have
become sufficiently widespread.
By the same token, however, democracy remains a fragile achievement
that is in danger of backsliding where emancipative values are weak.
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Emancipative values (1940–2000)
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Figure 2 Societal progress as human emancipation. Source: Reprint of Figure 4.5 in Welzel (2013, p. 160), by permission of the
author, see: www.cambridge.org/9781107664838.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Sharp inner-societal divisions over people’s access to action resources and
the life opportunities attached to these resources constitute the single-most
important cause behind the parochialisms embedded in familism, religiosity,
and nationalism that block emancipative values.
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. Future research would be well advised to measure
emancipative values in more nuanced ways and to study in greater detail
these values’ drivers and the dynamics by which they transgress cultural
boundaries or stop short of them. A promising new route of research includes
survey experiments, using exposure to authoritarian indoctrinations as a randomized treatment, to figure out how strongly people’s resistance against
such manipulations depends on their adherence to emancipative values and
to see how value-induced resistance strength interacts with personality traits
and the overall prevalence of emancipative values in a person’s reference
group.
REFERENCES
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Aléman, J., & Woods, D. (2016). Value orientations from the world values survey.
Comparative Political Studies, 48, 1–25.
Alexander, A. C., Inglehart, R., & Welzel, C. (2015). Emancipating sexuality: Breakthroughs into a bulwark of tradition. Social Indicators Research, 102, 1–27.
Alexander, A., & Welzel, C. (2017). The myth of de-consolidation: Rising liberalism and the populist reaction. Journal of Democracy, 28 (online debate forum:
http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles-files/foa-mounk-exchange/alexa
nder-welzel).
Almond, G. A., & Verba, S. (1963). The civic culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bratton, M., Mattes, R., & Gymiah-Boadi, E. (2005). Public opinion, democracy, and market reform in Africa. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
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Hadenius, A., & Teorell, J. (2005). Cultural and economic prerequisites of democracy.
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Kruse, S., Ravlik, M., & Welzel, C. (2017). The legitimacy puzzle: Why so many people
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Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. New York, NY: Knopf.
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Welzel, C., & Inglehart, R. (2018). Political culture, mass beliefs and value change. In
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Welzel, C., Inglehart, R., & Kruse, S. (2015). Pitfalls in the study of democratization:
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Member of the German Academy of Sciences, Christian Welzel
(cwelzel@gmail.com) is the political culture research professor at Leuphana
University in Lunenburg, Germany. He is also president (emer.) and vice
president of the World Values Survey Association and chief foreign director
of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR) at the National
Research University-Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg and
Moscow, Russia. Welzel’s research focuses on human empowerment, emancipative values, cultural change, and democratization. Recipient of multiple
large-scale grants, Welzel is the author of more than a hundred-and-fifty
scholarly publications. Besides his award-winning Freedom Rising (2013
at CUP, winner of the Alexander George Award and the Stein Rokkan Prize),
the most recent books include Democratization (with Christian Haerpfer,
Ronald Inglehart and Patrick Bernhagen, 2nd fully revised and updated
edition at OUP 2018), The Civic Culture Transformed (with Russell J. Dalton, at
CUP 2014); and Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy (with Ronald
Inglehart, 2005 at CUP). Funded by the German Science Foundation’s
Reinhart Koselleck Award, Welzel currently directs research on the project
“The Cool Water Effect: The Geo-Climatic Origin of Western Civilization’s
Emancipatory Dynamic.”
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