Students of democracy increasingly emphasize the fact that democracy implies government by the people, not mere “electoral democracy” in which elites hold elections but the citizens have little real influence on their actions. Genuinely “effective democracy” does not simply result from elite cost-benefit calculations. It emerges when ordinary people acquire resources and values that enable them to put effective pressures on elites– a process that we term “human empowerment.” “Self-expression values” reflect a syndrome of interpersonal trust, tolerance and political activism that plays a crucial role in the emergence and survival of democracy. When people have relatively ample economic and cognitive resources, and move from emphasizing survival values toward emphasizing self-expression values, they become most effective in the struggle to obtain democratic institutions.
About the Authors
Christian Welzel
Christian Welzel is political culture research professor at Leuphana University in Lüneberg, Germany, and the former president of the World Values Survey Association. His books include Freedom Rising: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation (2013).
Ronald F. Inglehart, Amy and Alan Lowenstein Professor of Democracy, Democratization, and Human Rights at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and codirector of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia, directs the World Values Survey, which has surveyed representative national samples of the publics of 97 countries.
A Central American military once again returned to the political center stage in 2009, but this had less to do with power-hungry generals than with warring civilian elites whose respect…
A look at liberal democracy’s complex historical evolution shows that elite fantasies of liberalism without democracy are ill-founded. Authoritarian legacies and democratic deficits lie at the core of trends that threaten…
