Using the natural laboratory of 18 post-communist Central and Eastern European countries, this article presents a basic model for democratic transition, specifically testing two alternative explanations for the degree of citizen satisfaction with the performance of their fledgling democracies: 1) virtues of omission, which include bad actions from which the state refrains, namely violations of individual human rights, and 2) virtues of commission, which include positive state actions, in particular actions enhancing economic well-being. The findings clearly indicate that, during the transition period, citizens' sense of the condition of human rights is consistently more important than are perceived economic prospects as predictors of democratic performance.

Congruence theory suggests that democratic institutions are supplied on a level that is congruent with mass demands for democracy. Recently this claim has been disconfirmed by showing that the cross-country correlation between the institutional supply of democracy and mass demands for democracy is weak. But this finding is flawed because of inflated measurements that give an embellished picture of many societies’ democratic reality. To validate this point we demonstrate that standard measures of both the institutional supply of democracy and of mass demands for democracy are often seriously deflated as one weights them by characteristics relevant to democracy in practice. These weighting procedures yield “effective” institutional supplies of democracy and “genuine” mass demands for democracy, providing a more realistic picture of a society’s state of democracy. Using these realistic measures, congruence between the institutional supply of democracy and mass demands for democracy becomes much more strongly evident, reconfirming congruence theory. Further evidence suggests that democratic congruence is rather a development-driven than an institutionally-inherited phenomenon. The article concludes with a discussion of this finding in a typological framework of democratization.

This article demonstrates that socioeconomic development, cultural change and democratization constitute a coherent syndrome of social progress- a syndrome whose common focus has not been properly specified by classical modernization theory. We specify this syndrome as Human Development, arguing that its three components have a common focus on broadening human choice. Socioeconomic development broadens peoples' choice by increasing their individual resources; cultural change gives rise to self-expression values that let people seek for broader choice; and democratization institutionalizes effective rights, giving human choice a legal basis. Analysis of data from the World Values Surveys demonstrates: (1) that the syndrome of individual resources, self-expression values and effective rights is universal in its presence across nations, regions and cultural zones; (2) that this Human Development syndrome is shaped by a causal effect from individual resources and self-expression values on effective rights; and (3) that this effect operates through its impact on elite integrity, as the factor which makes given rights effective.