Democratic Deconsolidation Reconsidered: Support for Democracy Recovers Among Young Europeans, Broad Decline in Africa

Recent debates on ‘democratic deconsolidation’ raise three key questions: are younger people less supportive of democracy; where is this occurring; and is the trend worsening? This paper addresses these questions by comparing African and European democracies using five rounds of the Integrated Values Survey and nine rounds of the Afrobarometer. We apply age-period-cohort-interaction models to assess generational support for democracy and openness to authoritarian alternatives; we also differentiate democratic trajectories across regions. In Africa, the dominant pattern is a general downward trend in democratic support and rejection of authoritarianism, in some cases led by younger cohorts. In Europe, although cohort effects continue to reflect declines in democratic support that were concentrated among younger age groups in the past, support for democracy subsequently recovered among more recent cohorts. However, some European electoral democracies show a rise in openness to authoritarianism, especially among young cohorts.