The Demand Side of Democratic Backsliding: How Divergent Understandings of Democracy Shape Political Choice

Why do citizens in democracies fail to punish political candidates who openly violate democratic standards at the ballot box? The bulk of existing research assumes that a common understanding of democracy underpins citizens’ evaluations of different candidates, resulting in a trade-off between undemocratic practices and partisan or economic considerations. We shed doubt on this assumption by showing that divergent understandings of democracy coexist among citizens and affect vote choice. We leverage a novel approach to estimate individual-level citizen commitment to democracy by means of a candidate choice conjoint experiment in Poland, a country experiencing democratic backsliding in a context of deep polarization. We find support for our claim that respondents with less clear-cut liberal democratic attitudes not only tolerate democratic violations more readily, but do so irrespective of a given candidate’s partisan affiliation. Thus, we contend that a lack of attitudinal consolidation around liberal democratic norms explains continued voter support for authoritarian-leaning leaders.

Internalization of Pancasila Values and Nationalism in High Schools Through Citizenship Education

As citizens and the future generation, high school students are required to understand and carry out their rights and obligations according to their age level. Citizenship Education as a subject in schools must emphasize building their character. The substance of learning begins to make citizens who can participate effectively, intelligently, democratically, and responsibly. This literature study scrutinized this education pattern by analyzing six articles published in different settings in Indonesian high schools. The study results explain that Citizenship Education is directed to achieve two balanced main goals. First, Citizenship Education is functioned to improve students’ knowledge and skills about ethics, morals, and principles in the life of the nation and state, then to shape attitudes, behaviour, and personality by the noble values of the Indonesian nation. These two goals should be achieved so that students understand scientific concepts and principles and can do something using scientific concepts and principles that they have mastered in everyday life. Citizenship education should equip students with adequate intellectual knowledge and skills, which allow them to participate intelligently and responsibly in various dimensions of life to form democratic attitudes.

The Ripple Effect of Civic Education Empowerment: Unravelling the Pillars of Good Citizenship

Discourse on pivotal current issues through and in education is the best approach to promote civic engagement and meaningful political participation among the youth. In this paper, the benefits of civic education empowerment from among Grade 12 students of Sablan National High School was explored. The essence of civic education empowerment has three main goals: political knowledge and understanding, democratic attitudes, and a readiness for democratic political action. Schools play an important role in catalyzing increased civic engagement; they can do this by enabling the youth to develop and practice the knowledge, beliefs, and behaviours needed to participate in civic life. The ripple effect of civic education empowerment is manifested in the relevant learning experiences obtained by the participants in terms of their civic knowledge and civic skills. As to how these civic knowledge and civic skills enhance their civic dispositions and participation, it is evident that participant-respondents assimilated the necessary civic knowledge for an informed choice which reflects their civic dispositions in the formulation of their standards for suffrage. Civic knowledge, civic skills, and civic dispositions and participation constitute the core elements of an informed and active citizenship.

The short-term, circumscribed, and conditional effects of cross-partisan conversation

Scholars and activists have raised alarm about affective polarization---voters' increasing dislike for supporters of opposing political parties---and its potential negative implications for democracy. Organizations, activists, and scholars have identified cross-partisan conversations as a promising paradigm for reducing affective polarization and, in turn, bolstering democratic accountability. However, existing theory and empirical work remains ambiguous. We argue that cross-partisan conversations have potential to reduce intergroup prejudices, but that such one-shot interactions are likely to have short-term effects that decay, would be circumscribed within the interpersonal domain and not extend to democratic attitudes, and would be conditional on topic, diminishing if the conversations dwell on group differences. We support this argument with results from two unique experiments where we paired outpartisan strangers in real time to discuss randomly assigned topics face-to-face over video calls. In Study 1, we found that non-political conversations between outpartisans dramatically decreased affective polarization, reversing over two decades' worth of increases. However, these impacts decayed completely in a follow-up survey. Moreover, the conversations had no effect on outcomes related to democratic accountability, such as support for outpartisan politicians. Study 2 replicated Study 1's results in a more representative sample and included conversations about group differences (i.e., politics). We again found large effects of non-political cross-partisan conversations on affective polarization, but that conversations about group differences had no effects. All conversations were again ineffective at changing democratic attitudes. Our results support our argument regarding the conditional, short-term, and circumscribed effects of cross-partisan conversations.

The Ripple Effect of Civic Education Empowerment: Unravelling the Pillars of Good Citizenship

Discourse on pivotal current issues through and in education is the best approach to promote civic engagement and meaningful political participation among the youth. In this paper, the benefits of civic education empowerment from among Grade 12 students of Sablan National High School was explored. The essence of civic education empowerment has three main goals: political knowledge and understanding, democratic attitudes, and a readiness for democratic political action. Schools play an important role in catalyzing increased civic engagement; they can do this by enabling the youth to develop and practice the knowledge, beliefs, and behaviours needed to participate in civic life. The ripple effect of civic education empowerment is manifested in the relevant learning experiences obtained by the participants in terms of their civic knowledge and civic skills. As to how these civic knowledge and civic skills enhance their civic dispositions and participation, it is evident that participant-respondents assimilated the necessary civic knowledge for an informed choice which reflects their civic dispositions in the formulation of their standards for suffrage. Civic knowledge, civic skills, and civic dispositions and participation constitute the core elements of an informed and active citizenship.

Measurement Invariance of Liberal and Authoritarian Notions of Democracy: Evidence From the World Values Survey and Additional Methodological Considerations

This article offers a gentle introduction to the measurement invariance (MI) literature with a focus on its relevance to comparative political research. It reviews 1) the conceptual foundations of MI; 2) standard procedures of testing for MI in practical applications within the multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) paradigm; and 3) two novel approaches to MI, Bayesian approximate measurement invariance, and MGCFA alignment optimization, which are especially suitable for dealing with extremely heterogeneous data from large-scale comparative surveys typical for modern political science. It then provides an empirical illustration of the key concepts and methods from the MGCFA-MI literature by applying them to testing for MI of two recently introduced measures of democracy attitudes, so-called liberal and authoritarian notions of democracy, across 60 countries in the sixth round of the World Values Survey. These analyses show that both measures can be considered reliable comparative measures of democratic attitudes, although for different reasons. Finally, this study emphasizes that some survey-based constructs, e.g., authoritarian notions of democracy, do not follow the reflective (correlation-based) logic of construct development. These alternative measures, known as formative measures, do not assume strong correlations between their indicators, for which reason it is inappropriate to test their comparability using the reflective MGCFA approach. Instead, their comparability can be tied to their correlations with theoretically relevant external variables.

Actualization of Pancasila in The Implementation of Ethical Democracy in The Global Era

As a value system, Pancasila provides a fundamental basis in the life of the community, nation, and state. The essence of the fourth principle of Pancasila is about democracy which is based on wisdom that is rooted in the moral principle of humanity and divinity. Therefore, according to the Pancasila view, democracy must be based on religious moral originating from God, justice and civilization. Nowadays, by seeing the application of democracy in Indonesia still has many problems, likes freedom as a symbol of democracy is not balanced with its quality, resulting in behavior that is contrary to democracy. Although freedom is guaranteed in the Constitution, oppression, discrimination, marginalization still occurs. Democracy does not only require laws, regulations, and institutions capable of enforcing it, but also democratic attitudes, namely the willingness to build a compromise with the awareness that a person cannot realize all that is desired (a combination of individual awareness and group awareness). True democracy requires good citizens. Therefore, democratic education that integrated through Citizenship Education is absolutely necessary with the aim of preparing citizens who are able to act with democratic ethics.

When Clientelism Backfires: Vote Buying, Democratic Attitudes, and Electoral Retaliation in Latin America

Attempting to buy votes is, in some cases, inefficient and damaging to a clientelistic party. To explain why, we propose the concept of electoral retaliation: sanctioning clientelistic parties by voting against them or intentionally invalidating the ballot. These forms of negative reciprocity are meant to uphold the democratic norms—equal participation, popular sovereignty, electoral fairness—that vote buying undermines. Electoral retaliation is, we theorize, the domain of “democrats.” Thus, we expect voters who highly value democratic norms to be most likely to retaliate against vote-buying parties. We test our theory’s observable implications with a research design that pairs case study and subnational evidence from Argentina with cross-national evidence from Latin America. Results are consistent with the notion that when clientelistic parties target democrats, it is likely to backfire on the machine. Our analyses examine multiple indicators of democratic support, explore causal mechanisms, conduct placebo tests, and seek to rule out various forms of selection bias.

The early COVID-19 pandemic and democratic attitudes

How does a public health crisis like a global pandemic affect political opinions in fragile democratic contexts? Research in political science suggests several possible public reactions to crisis, from retrospective anti-incumbency to rally ‘round the flag effects to democratic erosion and authoritarianism. Which of these obtains depends on the nature of the crisis. We examine whether and how the onset of the global pandemic shifted public opinion toward the president, elections, and democracy in Haiti. We embedded two experiments in a phone survey administered to a nationally representative sample of Haitians in April-June 2020. We find that the early pandemic boosted presidential approval and intentions to vote for the incumbent president, consistent with a rally effect. These results show that a rally effect occurs even in the most unlikely of places–an unstable context in which the incumbent president is struggling to maintain order and support. At the same time, we find scant evidence that the onset of the pandemic eroded democratic attitudes, even in a context in which democracy rests on uncertain grounds.