New Democracies By Artur Victoria At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Political scientists have long argued that low levels of citizen support can pose serious problems for democratic systems because both the functioning and the maintenance of democratic politics are intimately linked with what and how citizens think about democratic governance.

This is not only the case for more mature democratic systems; it is equally true for systems undergoing democratic transitions. In fact, questions of popular support for democratic governance are particularly important for emerging democracies because citizen support is of practical and immediate relevance for the continued stability of emerging democratic institutions.

Understanding why democracies differ in their levels of public approval for democratic governance is thus important for theoreticians and policymakers alike.

While a theoretical case can be made for each perspective‘s independent as well as their combined ability to explain cross-national variation in system support, the overall empirical evidence in favor of each (or both) remains inconclusive.

There are several reasons for this:

- most studies of support for democratic governance has focused only on a small number of countries at any one time.
- such studies often have —loaded the dice“ in favor of their preferred explanation by focusing exclusively on finding support for one set of factors instead of examining the relative explanatory power of each while controlling for others.
- the vast majority of studies have focused on the mature democracies of Western Europe and North America.

Any one of these research strategies is appropriate under different circumstances-for example, to determine the face validity of an explanation or usefulness of a variable;

when data constraints do not allow for the testing of hypotheses with a larger number of countries;

or when these systems are virtually the only ones that can be studied. As a consequence, students of comparative system support have yet to address the following questions in a very systematic fashion:

(1) what is the relative strength of civic culture-and performance-based explanations in models of system support? That is, when examined in tandem, which one provides greater empirical leverage?

(2) Are these explanations, which typically are put to use to explain differences in system support in older democracies, useful for understanding such differences across the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe?

A perennial issue of concern has been whether theories developed in one context have much leverage in another. Applying old theories to new data-such as applying theories developed in the context of American politics to other countries or applying theories developed in established democracies to those undergoing transitions-is a common modus operandi, but also one that frequently has been fraught with conceptual and empirical problems.

The questions raised speak directly to the issue of how we can conduct fair and comparable tests of our theories with new data and in new contexts.

The results also should add to our understanding of political behavior in countries undergoing democratic transitions by indicating whether our theories have much leverage in such settings.

However, such a research strategy is not designed to maximize the explained variance in the dependent variable of interest (democracy satisfaction). In fact, because theories that work well in Western Europe may not work as well in Eastern Europe.

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