Democracy under scrutiny: Elites, citizens, cultures

Front Cover
Ursula J. van Beek
Barbara Budrich, May 19, 2010 - Political Science - 334 pages
Values – elites and ordinary people This book reveals the diverse worlds of history, civic culture and values of South Africa, South Korea, Chile, Poland, Turkey, Germany and Sweden. It explores the similarities and contrasts between the values of the elites and the ordinary people. Written from various disciplinary perspectives and offering both empirical evidence and insiders’ knowledge, this book is bound to interest a wide variety of readers. The study on which the book reports was in the main based on analyses of value orientations of the parliamentary and media elites and those of the ordinary citizens. The data for the elites were obtained from surveys conducted for the purposes of the study; the data for the general population were drawn from the latest World Values Surveys. The volume is divided into two parts. The first part, entitled Theory and history, considers the quality of democracy in the context of the historical and cultural heritage of the seven countries, their civic culture and notions of citizenship, and their constitutions as foundations of the democratic political order. The second part of the book, entitled Theory and empiricism, assesses the quality of democracy by means of comparative analyses of the convergence and divergence in value orientations of the elites and the masses, both within each case and across all the seven cases.
 

Contents

Acknowledgements
7
A historical perspective
31
Civic culture citizenship and the quality of democracy
73
The quality of young democracies from a constitutional perspective
95
Political support and democratic performance in old and
147
The salience of the socioeconomic cleavage in old and
173
The quality of governance and socioeconomic performance
201
Religion as an intervening factor
221
Elites and publics compared
241
Political communication and the quality of democracy
263
Conclusions
297
Index
329
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About the author (2010)

Ursula J. van Beek is a professor and Head of Transformation Research Initiative (TRI) at University of Stellenbosch, South Africa.

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