Most research on political culture is driven by the assumption that mass attitudes impact on democracy. Despite the centrality of this premise, evidence showing that attitudes affect the level of democracy a society attains and sustains is rare and inconclusive in major points. This article presents the most comprehensive such evidence to date, testing attitudinal variables from three main schools in the political culture literature, as predictors of six different measures of democracy, using data from almost 70 societies. The results are remarkably consistent. Regardless of which measure of democracy is used, emancipative attitudes outperform other types of attitudes, giving the best predictions of later measures of democracy. This finding holds controlling for the impact of structural societal factors, such as economic development, world market integration, ethnic fractionalization, and prior democracy. Further specifications of the causal mechanism show that emancipative attitudes help both to attain and to sustain high levels of democracy. I conclude that a pro-democratic political culture is most firmly rooted in emancipative attitudes.

This article argues that “human empowerment” is the most important driving force behind effective democratization. Though elite agreements are central to establish nominal democracy, effective democracy does not emerge because elites concede it to the masses, but because ordinary people become increasingly capable and willing to place effective mass pressures on the elites. Effective democracy is thus the outcome of a broader process of “human empowerment.”

This article presents evidence for a rising emancipatory spirit, across generations and around the world, in a life domain in which traditional family, fertility and sex (FFS) norms have been most resistant to emancipatory gains since the ages: reproductive freedoms. We propose an explanation of rising emancipative values that integrates several theoretical approaches into a single idea—the utility ladder of freedoms. Specifically, we suggest that objectively improving living conditions--from rising life expectancies to broadening education to better technologies—transform the nature of life from a source of threats to suffer into a source of opportunities to thrive. As living conditions begin to hold more promise for increasing population segments, societies climb the utility ladder of freedoms: supporting universal freedoms becomes increasingly instrumental to use the opportunities that a more promising life offers. This trend has begun to spill over into a life domain in which traditional FFS norms have until recently been able to block emancipatory gains: reproductive freedoms. We present (1) cross-national, (2) longitudinal, (3) generational and (4) multi-level evidence on an unprecedentedly broad basis in support of this theory.

Evidence that Muslims support patriarchal values more than Non-Muslims is abundant but the nature of this evidence is contested. The ‘cultural’ interpretation suggests that patriarchal values are an inherent element of Muslim identity. The ‘structural’ interpretation holds that patriarchal values reside in structural characteristics and have little to do with Muslim identity. Evidence on these contradictory claims is inconclusive. Neither have advocates of the cultural position shown that Muslim support for patriarchal values remains robust under control of structural characteristics; nor have proponents of the structural position demonstrated that Muslim support for these values vanishes under such controls. Filling this gap, we use multi-level models to test whether Muslim support for patriarchal values vanishes under control of patriarchy’s structural underpinnings. We find that Muslim support for patriarchal values is robust against various controls. And, we identify mosque attendance as a mechanism to sustain Muslim support for patriarchy in Non-Muslim societies. Yet, rising levels of education, labor market participation, and a glacial emancipative trend diminish Muslim support for patriarchy, especially among women.

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.