Abstract
Empirical evidence of how citizens around the world understand democracy highlights the predominance of the liberal model of democracy. Yet the existence of a dominant view does not mean that all citizens in every nation exclusively endorse a liberal conceptualization. Hence, this article asks whether public beliefs about the meaning of democracy affect people’s political attitudes and behaviors. Using data from the 2006–2007 Latin American Public Opinion Project AmericasBarometer surveys, the author develops a taxonomy to categorize democratic conceptualizations in terms of structural complexity and substantive content. The author then examines the effects of the structure and substance of democratic conceptualizations on attitudes toward democracy and on patterns of political participation. Findings indicate that variance in the structure of citizens’ democratic conceptualizations brings several effects on political attitudes and behaviors. As to the substantive content of democratic conceptualizations, conceiving of democracy in terms other than liberty influences numerous aspects of citizens’ attitudes and behaviors.
Reflecting on the outcomes of the third wave of democratization, Carothers (1997) noted that although democratic systems in various nations may have had idiosyncratic features, all shared key elements of the liberal democratic model. Carothers commented that “what is notable about the recent democratic trend is the similarity of political aspirations of such different societies, from Mongolia to Mali, to Macedonia, and the conformance of such aspirations to that basic model” (p. 1). Few would disagree with Carothers’s point regarding the dominance of the liberal model. Yet the adoption of norms, practices, and institutions that delineate the liberal architecture of current democratic systems does not imply that all citizens in every nation exclusively endorse a liberal view. Unlike those in advanced industrial democracies, citizens in most developing nations have had neither extended experience with liberal democratic practices nor prolonged exposure that fosters consensus regarding the properties and legitimacy of liberal practice. Thus, an improved understanding of democratization in emerging and developing democracies requires a careful consideration of how citizens in these nations actually conceive of democracy.
How citizens form their views of democracy is likely the result of a multiplicity of factors operating at the individual and societal levels. Rather than assuming that all citizens conceive of democracy similarly, we should approach as an empirical matter the questions of whether there is commonality in views about democracy across individuals and groups within a nation, the extent to which conceptions of democracy vary across nations, and what the political implications of such views are (for a related view, see Carlin & Singer, 2011). In the past few years, major cross-national surveys (e.g., the Post-Communist Citizen Project, Afrobarometer, East Asian Barometer, Latinobarometer, and AmericasBarometer) have asked what is on the minds of citizens when they think about democracy, producing a rich body of data used in numerous studies on mass-level conceptions (e.g., Baviskar & Malone, 2004; Bratton, Mattes, & Gyimah-Boadi, 2005; Camp, 2001; Carrión, 2008; Dalton, Shin, & Jou, 2007a, 2007b; Lagos, 2008; Schedler & Sarsfield, 2007). This research has shown that people in various regions of the world can and do provide definitions of democracy and also that citizens in most nations embrace a liberal definition. Still, there remain important variations across citizens within and across nations.
Extending this line of research, I ask whether variation in how citizens view democracy matters for politics. Do mass beliefs about the meaning of democracy affect people’s political attitudes and behaviors? Are certain views related to some political attitudes and behaviors and not to others? My specific focus is democratic conceptualizations in Latin America. Limiting inquiry in this manner brings analytical advantages. Broadly speaking, Latin American countries share a common recent political history. After decades of alternating between authoritarian and democratic rule, 1 the region as a whole then underwent unprecedented democratization. 2 With more than two decades of continued experience with democratic politics, one could reasonably expect that Latin American citizens have had time to develop informed views of democracy.
As a prerequisite to exploration of the effects of democratic conceptualizations, it is first necessary to consider which aspects of those conceptualizations warrant scrutiny. The framework I develop highlights two elements, structural complexity and substantive content. In the next section, I outline the rationale for attention to these features of democratic conceptualizations. Building on that foundation, a two-part empirical assessment first examines the distribution of views toward democracy in Latin America and then explores whether variation in complexity and content influences citizens’ political attitudes and patterns of political participation.
Studying the Meaning of Democracy
The contemporary understanding of democracy is multifaceted. The meaning of democracy has evolved in response to philosophical and theoretical arguments seeking to answer fundamental questions regarding who governs, how government should be organized, and how the people can best control their government. This intellectual and political progression has resulted in the association of democracy with a variety of understandings, including the ideas of liberty, equality, participation, contestation, republicanism, representation, and the protection of citizens’ rights, that remain germane to contemporary discourse on democracy and thus underscore the complexity and multidimensionality of current understandings of democracy. 3
To understand the nature and significance of citizens’ conceptualizations of democracy, I contend that attention to the content and complexity of those views is needed. Past research provides an important starting point. In the past five decades, many empirical studies have shed light on the political culture of Western democracies. In the United States, numerous studies have examined citizens’ beliefs about democracy and democratic principles and values (e.g., Converse, 1964; Dryzek & Berejikian, 1993; Gibson, 1986, 1989; Lane, 1962; McClosky & Brill, 1983; Prothro & Grigg, 1960; Sniderman, 1975; Sullivan, Piereson, & Marcus, 1982). Many aspects of the political attitudes and behaviors of citizens in other Western democracies have been illuminated through cross-national research (Almond & Verba, 1963, 1980; Barnes et al., 1979; Dalton, 1988; Inglehart, 1977, 1990; Klingemann & Fuchs, 1995). Nonetheless, few studies have directly addressed the question of what the average citizen in these countries understands by democracy (e.g., Kornberg & Clarke, 1994; Sullivan, Shamir, Walsh, & Roberts, 1985; Thomassen, 1995).
Although scholars have sought to generate conceptual and analytical tools that capture the diversity of postauthoritarian regimes that have emerged since the mid-1970s, the most widely used conceptualization of democracy focuses on procedural considerations. In the tradition of Schumpeter (1942/1976) and Dahl (1971), this view centers on contested elections and effective guarantees of political and civil rights as the gold standards of democracy, whereas matters relating to economic and social characteristics of a society such as social justice, social equality, or corruption are typically considered to be outcomes or consequences of the democratic political process rather than features of democracy itself (Collier & Levitsky, 1997; Karl, 1990; cf. O’Donnell, 2004). Although this is an entirely plausible perspective, we should not presuppose that citizens of the world’s democracies share this view.
In tandem with this conceptual approach, a major tool for the study of democracy and democratization has been the development of barometers or cross-national surveys aiming to gauge public opinion regarding the political sphere within particular regions. A central concern for research on comparative democratization has been the assessment of the quality and stability of democracy in different countries, and thus many surveys have focused on support and/or evaluation of democratic regimes. A potential problem with this practice is that survey measures reflect assumptions about what political principles, values, and practices define democracy and therefore implicitly presume that citizens elsewhere share such assumptions.
Responding to these concerns, a recent body of comparative scholarship has produced evidence on the complex and multifaceted understanding of democracy in new and developing democracies (Bratton et al., 2005; Bratton & Mattes, 2001; Camp, 2001; Carrión, 2008; Dalton et al., 2007a, 2007b; Miller, Hesli, & Reisinger, 1997; Ottemoeller, 1998; Sarsfield, 2007; Schedler & Sarsfield, 2007; Shin, 1999). Most research thus far has endeavored to describe the different ways citizens conceive of democracy. This research has shown citizens from various regions of the world can and do provide a definition of democracy and also that in most nations a large portion of the citizens embrace a liberal definition of democracy (Dalton et al., 2007b). The cumulative body of research evidences the growing interest in this matter, yet critical questions remain unanswered. For example, little, if any, effort has been dedicated toward uncovering the implications of variance in how citizens conceive of democracy. If democracy means some things for some people and other things for other people, are these differences consequential?
Respondents may offer quite varied replies to open-ended items regarding the meaning of democracy. Because of this, I must develop a taxonomy to help organize my use of the data. Two facets hold central roles in my framework: structural complexity and substantive content. 4 The structure of a person’s conceptualization of democracy refers to whether the person offered a definition of democracy and to whether the person’s view encompasses one or more domains of meaning. Having the ability to define democracy and having a multifaceted rather than a one-dimensional understanding may be factors affecting how this person views political affairs and how the person acts politically. Second, having a definition, especially a rich definition of democracy, may have different consequences contingent on which meaning or meanings of democracy a person articulates. Thus, the content or substance of the conceptualization of democracy may also have implications for political attitudes and behavior. In the empirical analyses reported below, I first present descriptive evidence regarding the complexity and content of democratic conceptualizations in Latin America. Following this, I explore the possible effects of complexity and content on other political attitudes and behaviors.
Few studies have explored the consequences of variation in citizens’ views of democracy. For instance, does the ability to define democracy affect how people evaluate the political system? Are individuals with complex views of democracy more likely to support it? Do people who understand democracy primarily in terms of liberty act differently from those who emphasize social and economic outcomes? In an effort to address such questions, I examine the effects of the structure and substance of democratic conceptualizations on attitudes toward democracy and political participation.
One area in which democratic conceptualizations may matter concerns citizens’ corresponding attitudes toward democracy and its alternates. For example, studying democratic support in Africa, Mattes and Bratton (2007) found that “simply being able to provide any definition of what democracy means‖independently increases demand” (p. 202) for democracy. Likewise, Dalton and collaborators (2007b) argue that “the awareness of the term ‘democracy’ and a willingness to express a definition are initial indications of the depth of contemporary democratic understanding” (p. 146). Carrión (2008) reports that “the ability to define democracy is found to increase support for it” (p. 25) in the Americas. Thus, cross-national evidence demonstrates that the basic ability to define democracy is related to democratic support.
I posit that the complexity of democratic conceptualizations should be related to attitudes toward democracy. People with more complex and nuanced understandings of democracy should more strongly support democracy. To explore this idea, I examine the impact of the complexity of conceptualizations of democracy on indicators measuring support for democracy and support for democratic principles (i.e., tolerance and support for censorship). My expectation is that holding a “thick” understanding of democracy, defining democracy in a multifaceted manner, will be related to higher support for democracy and higher support for democratic principles.
In addition to the complexity of democratic conceptualizations, the content of those views also may be important. Past research again offers relevant insight. Bratton and Mattes’s (2001) influential work on African public opinion shows that normative and instrumental considerations guide evaluations of democracy. More recently, Mattes and Bratton (2007) find that a higher demand for democracy is related to seeing democracy in terms of procedures. In Mattes and Bratton’s words (2007), “It seems that viewing democracy through a procedural lens sensitizes people to the rights and freedoms they can expect and increases the probability they will reject those regimes that can not provide such guarantees” (p. 202). In the Americas, Carrión (2008) proposes a typology that distinguishes among normative, instrumental, empty, and pejorative views of democracy. On implementing this categorization, he finds that defining democracy in normative terms is only slightly more related to democratic support than doing so in instrumental terms, but defining democracy in negative terms is related to lower support.
In approaching the question of whether the content of democratic views affects attitudes toward democracy, I follow the simple intuition that given the predominance of “liberty and freedoms” understandings of democracy in Latin America, liberal meanings should be positively related to support for democracy and democratic principles. Likewise, any facet of meaning that relates to procedural and/or substantive aspects of the political process (i.e., equality, participation, rule of law) also should produce positive effects, although perhaps ones more modest than those for liberal conceptualizations. Conversely, I expect that definitions of democracy incorporating meanings others than procedural and substantive aspects of the political process—definitions based on societal outcomes and negative definitions of democracy—should diminish democratic support and support for democratic principles, especially relative to liberal conceptualizations.
Can conceptualizations of democracy affect civic engagement? Theories of participation emphasize the role that resources such as education and sophistication have on participation in politics (Brady, Verba, & Schlozman, 1995; Verba, Schlozman, & Brady, 1995). The general lesson is that the more resources people have at their disposal, the more likely they are to engage in politics. I posit that a person’s ability to define democracy is a conceptual tool that the individual may utilize when making choices about engagement in the political process. Greater complexity should mean that the individual is more committed to democratic governance and more aware of conventional avenues for civic engagement. Hence, a richer conceptual understanding of democracy functions as a resource that enhances the chances of participation in mainstream political activities. My expectation is that the complexity of democratic conceptualizations will be positively related to conventional participation (i.e., voting and attitudes toward legal protest) and, on the other hand, negatively related to unconventional participation (i.e., protesting and attitudes toward illegal protest). I hypothesize the latter both because complexity should correspond with greater attachment to democratic governance and corresponding legal channels of participation and because individuals with more complex understandings should be willing to consider a greater variety of legal avenues of civic engagement before turning to illegal protest.
The content of democratic conceptualizations also may affect people’s calculations to engage in political activity. First, I expect that those individuals who think about democracy in liberal terms, regardless of whether they use procedural and/or substantive definitional aspects, are more likely to engage in conventional political participation. Thus, definition of democracy in other terms should, as a general matter, correspond with a weakened tendency toward conventional participation. Second, and more specifically, those holding a negative view of democracy should be more likely to engage in acts of unconventional participation.
Latin Americans’ democratic conceptualizations will be examined in two manners. I begin with descriptive data intended to help gauge levels of variation in the content and complexity of views in the region. Subsequently, indicators of structural complexity and substantive content are developed and introduced as predictors in multivariate models regarding political attitudes and patterns of political participation.
How Latin Americans View Democracy
Do Brazilians, Costa Ricans, Venezuelans, and other Latin Americans differ in their views of democracy? If so, what is the nature of such differences? Are Latin Americans single-minded when defining democracy, or do they hold rich and complex understandings? To address these questions, I examine data from the 2006–2007 AmericasBarometer. These surveys were conducted in 13 Latin American nations as part of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), and all are based on national representative samples. 5 The surveys included an open-ended item regarding the meanings that respondents attach to the word democracy; thus, these data permit assessment of how respondents define democracy in their own words. The question reads, “In a few words, what is the meaning of democracy for you?” Allowing respondents to define democracy using their own words has the advantage that it is the respondents, not the researchers, who are articulating their understanding of democracy (Dalton et al., 2007b). Respondents could provide up to three answers. Hence, the resulting data can help to determine whether and to what extent respondents’ conceptualizations of democracy capture multiple facets of meaning (Dalton et al., 2007b), and whether respondents vary in the substance of their conceptualizations. 6
The utility of the three-response approach can be seen when assessing hypothetical response patterns. As one example, consider two respondents who each gave three answers, but one person offered three variants on the same theme (e.g., “liberty,” “freedom,” “the right to say what you want”) whereas the other listed three more distinctive meanings (e.g., “liberty,” “the right to participate in politics,” and “everyone is equal”). If each respondent first answered “liberty,” we would have no means to differentiate the two respondents on a survey that asked for only a single response. As a second example, we can contrast the above respondents with a third person who offered one answer, “liberty.” A single-response approach again would fail to differentiate between this respondent and the others, whereas the three-response format permits categorization of respondents in terms of the variety and complexity of their conceptualizations of democracy.
Can typical citizens provide a definition of democracy? Figure 1 depicts the percentage of respondents who offer definitional responses versus those who do not. 7 Nearly three fourths of respondents provided at least one definition of democracy. As to the distribution of responses, it is clear that there is variation across countries. For instance, only 54% of respondents in Paraguay define democracy versus 90% in Uruguay. There appears to be an interregional difference, with low rates of definitional response prevalent in Central America and the highest rates in nations with the most extensive democratic traditions. 8 Regional variation in the ability to define democracy is not exclusive to Latin America; Dalton et al. (2007a) report that research conducted in other areas of the world shows “the public’s ability to define democracy varies considerably across countries and time periods” (p. 4).
Distribution of definitional versus nondefinitional responses of meaning of democracy
Considering whether respondents can define democracy at all provides only a first cut at discerning which conceptualizations Latin Americans possess. Citizens who have the ability to define democracy still may vary in important ways in their definitions. For example, they can differ in the number of meanings that they attach to democracy and in the extent to which these meanings represent a thin or thick understanding of democracy.
In their analysis of the public’s cognitive capacities in Russia and Ukraine, Miller et al. (1997) reported the number of meanings that people associated with democracy. The rationale behind this approach is that those respondents giving the highest number of responses presumably will have a more fully developed understanding of democracy than those who say little or nothing. A potential limitation of simply counting the number of meanings of democracy, however, is that this strategy may be capturing other influences such as the propensity of the respondent to acquiesce with the task of answering questions, personality traits or sheer verbosity.
One way to address this matter is to determine whether the meanings of democracy provided by a respondent reveal a multifaceted understanding. Because the open-ended question prompts respondents to provide up to three definitions, the range of number of meanings that a respondent can offer varies between 0 and 3. What the number of responses does not tell us is whether those persons giving more than one answer do so by using distinct facets of the meaning of democracy. Alternately, respondents offering more than one statement may merely alter their wording a bit while restating essentially the same concept.
Scholars studying popular conceptions of democracy have used different schemes to classify responses to meaning of democracy questions (Bratton & Mattes, 2001; Carrión, 2008; Dalton et al., 2007a, 2007b; Sarsfield, 2007; Sarsfield & Echegaray, 2006). Here, I follow a maximalist approach. I group the responses to the democratic meaning questions into eight specific categories: no meaning, liberty and freedoms, political equality, participation, rule of law, economic and social outcomes, negative meaning, and other meanings. 9 Because I seek to examine the conceptualizations of democracy of Latin American citizens as they formulate them in their own minds and then to examine any impact of these conceptualizations on specific attitudes and behaviors, a detailed classificatory scheme best serves my purposes.
Do respondents who offer more responses to the meaning of democracy item have more complex beliefs about democracy? Table 1 compares the number of answers and the number of different facets of meaning. 10 It is clear that although these two measures are related, they do not capture precisely the same thing. Almost 20% of respondents gave three replies, but only 8% of respondents actually defined democracy using three distinct facets. Similarly, although 35% of respondents offered only a single answer to the question of democratic meaning, one-dimensional definitions represent 43% of the responses when their level of complexity is taken into account. In short, the willingness to offer more responses does not automatically translate into more complex understandings of democracy. To the contrary, many respondents who offer multiple answers merely restate their initial positions or, at the least, hit on slightly different variants of the same general facet of democratic meaning.
Multidimensional Definitions of Democracy
The measure of complexity of meaning includes the following substantive dimensions: liberty, equality, participation, rule of law, economic and social outcomes, other. Negative meanings, which mostly represent complaints about the performance of the incumbent government in the respondent’s nation, are counted as answers, but they are not counted as part of the complexity measure.
Considering only persons who offered at least one answer to the democratic meaning item, Figure 2 shows that a one-dimensional view is most common. This level especially characterizes respondents in Paraguay (86%) and El Salvador (68%). Overall, 60% of respondents provide one-dimensional definitions. Holding a three-part conceptualization is characteristic of only 11% of respondents. However, a larger number of respondents in Nicaragua (22%) and Brazil (16%) offer more complex views. Interestingly, countries with the longest democratic traditions such as Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Chile do not have the largest percentages of respondents with complex conceptualizations. These results suggest that rather than simple experience, perhaps features of the national environment such as economic conditions and the nature of political debate may affect mass understandings of democracy.
Complexity of conceptualizations of democracy
Having shown that the people of Latin America vary in the ability to define democracy and in the complexity of democratic conceptualizations, I next examine the substance of these views. The coding system used here differentiates among several facets of meaning. At question is whether some facets are more prominent than others and whether respondents across the nations under consideration emphasize similar or different conceptualizations.
Prior studies on popular conceptions of democracy have revealed the dominance of “liberty, freedoms, and civil rights” responses in Latin America (Camp, 2001; Carrión, 2008; Lagos, 2008) and elsewhere (Dalton et al., 2007b). The 2006–2007 AmericasBarometer data show the same pattern of responses for Latin America: Of respondents, 44% replied to the question of democratic meaning by conceiving of democracy in terms of liberty, broadly defined. The supremacy of a liberal understanding of democracy is not restricted to the principle of liberty, as it also involves references to procedural aspects of democracy (20%) and the principle of equality (14%).
Inspection of the patterns of response across nations reveals some notable differences. In Table 2, we see that liberty and civil rights is the modal response category in all countries but Colombia, where meanings related to participation are the most frequent responses. Although in most nations citizens think of democracy in terms of liberty and freedoms, this tendency is especially pronounced in four countries—Costa Rica, Uruguay, Chile, and Venezuela—where at least 60% of respondents define democracy with reference to liberty and freedoms.
Cross-National Variation in the Substantive Conceptualization of Democracy (percentages)
Cell entries indicate the percentage of respondents whose conceptualizations of democracy have been placed in each category using an eight-part taxonomy. Respondents could offer up to three definitions.
Considerations pertaining to participation represent the second most common meaning associated with democracy in Latin America. Colombia is the only nation in which this category constitutes the most frequent response (33%). Beyond liberty and participatory considerations, inspection of Table 2 shows that for each remaining facet of meaning there is a wide range of variation across countries.
Up to this point the analysis has assessed the nature of mass conceptualizations of democracy and has established that citizens in Latin America vary not only in their willingness to offer a definition of democracy but also in the levels of complexity of their conceptualizations. In addition, we have seen that although a liberal understanding of democracy is prevalent in Latin America, many citizens also report different connotations. I now turn to an examination of the consequences of varying understandings of democracy.
The Political Implications of Conceptualizations of Democracy
Latin Americans vary in how they conceptualize democracy. A liberal understanding of democracy is widespread in the region, yet analyses thus far also establish that this broad characterization belies a more intricate landscape. There is significant variation in the ability of citizens to define democracy across and within nations, and there are also important differences when the multifaceted nature of citizens’ conceptualizations is considered. Although meanings associated with a liberal understanding of democracy are common in the region, other views that relate to alternative conceptions of democracy such as rule of law and utilitarian views based on economic and social outcomes also abound. Moreover, about a fifth of the citizens in the region include in their definitions connotations that are not associated with any broad substantive facet of meaning, such as views that signal criticism of the incumbent government’s performance. What are the implications of these views of democracy for citizens’ political opinions and behaviors?
In line with my analytical distinction between the structure and substance of democratic conceptualizations, I follow a strategy that regresses a series of attitudinal and behavioral measures on the individual-level measures of the complexity and substantive content of democratic conceptualizations. All statistical models investigate individual-level effects using the cross- sectional pooled data set. 11 All models presented below include country fixed effects and robust standard errors with clustering by country to account for systematic national differences, while also correcting for possible heteroscedasticity (Steenbergen & Jones, 2002).
The key independent variables are conceptual complexity and a group of dummy variables capturing each specific facet. The complexity variable is the number of different definitional facets. The variable ranges from 0 (if the respondent offered no definition of democracy) to 3 (if the respondent presented three definitions corresponding to three distinct meanings). Thus, this variable measures both the ability to define democracy and the depth of the conceptualization of democracy. The specific meaning or meanings attached to the conceptualization of democracy are captured by seven dummy variables that measure each facet of my categorization system (no meaning, equality, participation, rule of law, social and economic outcomes, negative, and other meaning, with liberty as the omitted category). For each meaning variable, a score of 1 was assigned if a respondent mentioned that specific meaning in any of the three definitional questions, and a score of 0 if otherwise. Because liberty is used as the omitted category, coefficients for the meaning variables will indicate any consequences of alternate democratic conceptualizations.
The dependent variables tap attitudes toward democracy and political participation. The first dependent variables, those regarding attitudes toward democracy, include support for democracy, tolerance, and support for censorship. 12 The second group, concerning political participation, includes measures of voting behavior, protest behavior, and attitudes toward conventional and unconventional participation. The models include control variables that have been found to be related to attitudes toward democracy and political participation: gender, age, education, wealth, whether the person resides in an urban or rural area, political interest, interpersonal trust, and political knowledge.
Analyses begin in Table 3 with models regarding attitudes toward democracy. The complexity measure exerts two statistically significant effects, with greater conceptual complexity producing the expected impact on support for democracy and antipathy toward censorship. Among the content variables, results are consistent within each model. In the first model, concerning support for democracy, all seven coefficients for the content variables are negative, with four achieving statistical significance. Hence, when the content of democratic conceptualizations veers away from liberty, the general tendency is for democratic support to decline. All but one of the content coefficients also are negative in the tolerance model, but in this case the coefficients are negligible in size and statistically insignificant. Instead of democratic conceptualizations, tolerance appears to be driven primarily by information and civic engagement, with education, knowledge, and interest yielding sizeable effects. Last, all of the content variables produce positive coefficients in the censorship model, with three of the seven achieving statistical significance. An especially strong effect emerges for definition of democracy in terms of economic and social outcomes, a measure that focuses on pragmatic concerns such as employment and economic well-being. This result seemingly indicates that some citizens view democracy in highly instrumental terms; if the trains run on time, then suppression of the political opposition is seen as fair game.
Conceptualizations of Democracy and Support for Political Regimes and Democratic Principles
Models are estimated with robust standard errors and clustering by nation. Standard errors are in parentheses. Results for country dummies are not presented.
Ordinal logit estimates.
Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression estimates.
p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
To provide a sense of the substantive importance of democratic conceptualizations, a few illustrative predicted effects will be discussed. In each case, I focus on a hypothetical male respondent from Mexico with mean values on the control variables. In terms of support for democracy, the predicted probability of high support is 0.51 if the person offered no meanings. Conversely, the probability of high support is 0.55 if the person offered a single response focused on participation and 0.62 with a single response invoking liberty. If the individual offered three different replies, the predicted probability of high support for democracy is 0.61 if the meanings include economic considerations, participation and equality versus 0.74 in the case of liberty, rule of law, and other. Similar effects are observed for support for censorship. For example, the predicted level of support is 7.41 for a respondent who offered no answers on the democratic meaning items versus 7.80 for a person whose three meanings were coded as economic, other, and rule of law and 5.70 if the meanings addressed liberty, participation, and equality. Collectively, these examples demonstrate that both facets of democratic conceptualizations—complexity and substantive content—produce sizeable tangible effects on mass attitudes.
The next tests concern political participation and attitudes toward legal and illegal participatory acts. Models are reported in Table 4. Results are quite mixed across the four models. For voting, conceptual complexity produces a strong positive effect. However, among the content variables, only “no meaning” yields a significant effect. This suggests that the willingness to offer any substantive reply corresponds with an elevated likelihood voting, with that likelihood reaching its maximum for respondents with democratic conceptualizations that exhibit the greatest complexity. The second dependent variable, protest behavior, is not affected by conceptual complexity, but the likelihood that a person has joined a protest is greatest if the individual’s view of democracy includes reference to participation, equality, rule of law, and/or economic concerns. The weakest effects are observed for attitudes toward legal protest, where participation produces a modest positive result and negative meanings a modest negative result. Last, attitudes toward illegal protest vary considerably in response to democratic conceptualizations. Specifically, respondents with multifaceted views voice more antipathy toward illegal protest, whereas definitions involving participation, equality, rule of law, and economic outcomes all correspond with positive views of such protest activity.
Conceptualizations of Democracy and Political Participation
Models are estimated with robust standard errors and clustering by nation. Standard errors are in parentheses. Results for country dummies are not presented. Data for the second model are not available for Paraguay.
Binomial logit estimates.
Ordinal logit estimates.
Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression estimates.
p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
Substantively, the impact of democratic conceptualizations on voting behavior is modest. For a respondent who offered no answer on the democratic meaning item, the predicted likelihood of voting is 0.68. This rises to 0.76 if the person’s sole definition focused on liberty and to 0.79 if democracy was defined in terms of liberty, equality, and participation. More pronounced effects emerge for attitudes toward illegal protest. For instance, among respondents who offered three different meanings when defining democracy, the predicted level of support for illegal protest shifts by over two points, form 5.65 to 3.61, depending on whether the definition includes economic outcomes, equality and participation, or liberty, rule of law, and negative meanings.
Collectively, the results in Table 3 and Table 4 suggest several lessons. First, the structure and content of democratic conceptualizations both matter for citizens’ attitudes and patterns of political participation. Second, although these conceptualizations are influential, the effects vary widely across the facets of civic engagement considered here. In some cases, such as with support for democracy and attitudes toward illegal protest, numerous sizeable effects were reported. In other instances, as with tolerance and attitudes about legal protest, only a few modest effects were observed. Third, where significant results emerged, they exhibit consistency in direction across the various models. This consistency is especially evident with focus on conceptual complexity and on definition of democracy in terms of liberty. Greater complexity was found to correspond with higher levels of support for democracy, an elevated propensity to vote, and opposition toward both censorship and illegal protest. As to the substantive content of democratic definitions, in nearly every instance in which coefficients for nonliberty meanings reached statistical significance, they did so because deviation from a liberal conception corresponds with weakened commitments to democracy, democratic principles, and legal forms of civic engagement.
Conclusions
As democracy has gained a more solid hold in many of regions of the world, including Latin America, students of mass politics have devoted considerable attention to understanding citizens’ opinions regarding democratic regimes. For instance, a great deal of research has explored matters such as support for democracy, satisfaction with democracy, and attitudes toward alternates to democracy. In just the past few years, however, scholars have noted that such inquiries arguably put the cart before the horse. As a preface to these matters, we are well advised to step back and ask more fundamental questions regarding what citizens think democracy is, how democracy is defined, and whether variance in conceptualizations of democracy matters for patterns in civic engagement.
Scholars have long debated the philosophical and practical elements inherent in definitions of democracy. Given the lack of scholarly consensus, it would have been surprising to find all citizens of Latin American nations on the same page as one another in terms of how they conceptualize democracy. In the nations considered here, a great deal of variation was observed in the willingness of citizens to define democracy, the number of definitions they offered, whether democratic conceptualizations were multidimensional, and which substantive facets of democracy citizens emphasized in their definitions. On observing these aspects of citizens’ democratic conceptualizations, two broad questions may be asked: What gives rise to this variation, and do these differences matter for other important aspects of political behavior?
In this study, analyses have focused on the second of these questions. I have argued that variation in democratic conceptualizations can be assessed in terms of both structure and content. The possible effects of these forms of variation were examined with focus on two sets of dependent variables, measures of attitudes related to democracy and measures regarding political participation. The complexity of democratic conceptualizations was found to exert inconsistent influence, but discernible effects were observed for four of seven dependent variables. In contrast, variation in substantive definitions proved to be more consequential. Defining democracy in terms of liberty—the most common definition among the citizens in the region examined here—generally corresponds with support for democracy and its associated principles and practices. Because of this, deviations from liberal definitions most often produced results that may be seen as problematic for stable democratic governance, including lessened support for democracy itself and greater support for censorship and illegal protest activity.
Further research regarding the nature and significance of citizens’ democratic conceptualizations is essential. Two immediate needs warrant particular emphasis. First, given that the survey respondents studied here varied quite substantially in their interpretations of democracy, future inquiry should pursue explanations of this variation. Why is it that most citizens of Latin American nations define democracy in terms of liberty, yet some do not? Why do some respondents offer zero or one definition of democracy whereas others offer two or three? Why do many respondents offer negative views of democracy? A second and related point concerns the causal ordering of the relationships between democratic conceptualizations and other phenomena. I have proceeded from the working assumption that democratic conceptualizations are causally prior to matters such as attitudes toward democracy and the propensity to participate in politics. Such an assumption is reasonable for an initial empirical foray of the sort reported here, but a key next step in understanding the importance of citizens’ definitions of democracy will entail the development of richer theories and more nuanced empirical accounts so that we may pinpoint how and why democratic conceptualizations emerge, and with what consequences.
Footnotes
Appendix A
Classification Scheme of Responses to the Democracy Meaning Question
| Liberty | Equality | Participation | Rule of law | Economic and social outcomes | Negative | Other | No meaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Liberty (no specific) | Equality (no specific) | Right to choose leaders | Human rights, respect of | Well-being, economic progress, growth | Lack of liberty | Nonmilitary government | It does not mean anything |
| Economic liberty | Economic equality, equality of classes | Elections, voting | Justice | Capitalism | Lack of inequality | Live in peace, without war | Don’t know; no answer |
| Liberty of expression | Gender equality | Free elections | Obey the law, less corruption | Free trade, free business | Fraudulent elections | Other answer | |
| Liberty of movement | Equality before the law | Participation (without saying which type) | Employment, more opportunities of | Limitations of participation | |||
| Being independent | Racial or ethnic equality | Participation of minorities | Disorder, lack of justice, corruption | ||||
| Power of the people | Lack of employment | ||||||
| War, invasions |
Appendix B
Descriptive Statistics
| Descriptive statistics |
|||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| N | Min | Max | M | SD | |
| Complexity of conceptualization | 21,725 | 0.00 | 3.00 | 1.089 | 0.893 |
| Dimensions of meaning | |||||
| No meaning | 21,725 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.067 | 0.250 |
| Liberty meaning | 21,725 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.484 | 0.500 |
| Economic and social outcome meaning | 21,725 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.080 | 0.271 |
| Participation meaning | 21,725 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.197 | 0.398 |
| Rule of law meaning | 21,725 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.082 | 0.274 |
| Negative meaning | 21,725 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.053 | 0.225 |
| Other meaning | 21,725 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.108 | 0.311 |
| Support for democracy | 21,725 | 0.00 | 2.00 | 1.506 | 0.694 |
| Tolerance | 20,126 | 0.00 | 45.00 | 23.410 | 11.653 |
| Support for state censorship | 20,721 | 00 | 27.00 | 6.436 | 6.600 |
| Voting behavior | 21,265 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.736 | 0.441 |
| Protest behavior | 20,009 | 0.00 | 2.00 | 0.292 | 0.672 |
| Attitude toward legal protest | 21,002 | 0.00 | 27.00 | 19.080 | 6.392 |
| Attitude toward illegal protest | 21,153 | 0.00 | 36.00 | 5.979 | 6.868 |
| Sex | 21,725 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.491 | 0.500 |
| Education | 21,706 | 0.00 | 18.00 | 8.670 | 4.588 |
| Age | 21,713 | 16.00 | 89.00 | 38.086 | 15.508 |
| Wealth | 21,716 | 0.00 | 10.00 | 5.353 | 2.820 |
| Urban | 21,725 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.684 | 0.465 |
| Interpersonal trust | 21,329 | 0.00 | 3.00 | 1.842 | 0.936 |
| Political interest | 21,589 | 0.00 | 3.00 | 1.001 | 0.967 |
| Political knowledge | 21,725 | 0.00 | 5.00 | 2.378 | 1.493 |
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) and its major supporters (the United States Agency for International Development, the United Nations Development Program, the Inter-American Development Bank, and Vanderbilt University) for making the data available. I also would like to thank Jeff Mondak and the anonymous reviewers for providing helpful comments in earlier versions of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.