Regime Experience and Democratic Commitment: The Conditional Impact of Emancipative Values Across Political Systems Worldwide

Introduction: With the expansion of modernization, people in both democracies and autocracies increasingly prefer emancipative and liberal values that inspire support for democracy worldwide. However, people in different regimes are exposed to different political cultures and values. I investigate how the effect of individual value orientations on support for democracy is moderated by the political system and the pertaining culture. This has never been tested in a broad cross-regime context before. Methods I analyse cross-sectional time-series data from the World Value Survey (WVS), waves three to seven, which cover 104 countries with a total of 380,981 respondents. Additionally, I obtain the GDP per capita data for each country from the World Bank database, as well as data from Polity Project, V-Dem, and Freedom House to categorise the regimes. Multilevel models are developed with robustness tests to examine the hypothesis. Results The results show that the magnitude of the effect varies, as the influence of emancipative values on support for democracy is stronger in democracies than in autocracies. Discussions/Conclusions: The real-life experience of democracy fosters committed democrats, whereas non-democracy leads to ambivalent attitudes towards democracy due to contradictory value orientations. Thus, committed democrats support democracy more strongly than ambivalent democrats.