The Cultural Pre-Requisites of Democracy

This chapter discusses the mentality structures that must be encultured in a population to allow it to sustain stable democracy. Contrary to the mainstream in the literature, I argue that mass support for democracy, as expressed in surveys, is a rather deceptive indicator of a population’s cultural affinity to democracy. The reason is that support for democracy obscures firmly encultured differences in how people understand democracy. These differences in understanding render numerically similar support ratings incomparable across different populations. By contrast, emancipative values—which emphasize freedom of choice and equality of opportunities—base people’s notion of democracy on a similarly liberal understanding of the term. Hence, overt support for democracy is conducive to actual democracy only in conjunction with emancipative values, but not in dissociation from them. In conclusion, emancipative values represent the most important mentality element of a democratic culture.