Support for democracy and early socialization

Data postării: Jun 03, 2014 8:24:19 AM

Malina Voicu & Edurne Bartolome Peral. (2014).

Support for democracy and early socialization in a non-democratic country: does the regime matter?,

Democratization, 21(3): 554-573.

Mălina Voicu’s (member of our group) and Edurne Bartolomé Peral’s (from the University of Bilbao) paper came online during last year and was recently included in the third issue of Democratization.

The two authors explore the similarities and dissimilarities of support for democracy in Romania and Spain. The two countries faced transition processes, radically changing regimes from autocracy to democracy. However, they did it in different ages, at 30 years distance. The challenge is to see to which extent the social change process is similar and how the different context may change the rules of the game.

From a methodological point of view, it is interesting to notice how the autjors combine data from various surveys (the Standard Eurobarometer, the Central and Eastern Eurobarometer and the Candidate Countries Eurobarometer) in order to have a longitudinal approach to the topic. The focus is on inter-cohort change and hierarchical logistic regression is employed instead of the traditional ACP that Mălina Voicu used in her previous works.

The findings confirm the impact of early socialization on the diffuse support for democracy. In Spain, there is an incremental support for democracy for the cohorts born after 1960. In Romania, those born between the two World Wars and those socialized after the communist fall-down are more likely to support democracy than others are.

Find more reading the paper.