Dynamics and Trends of Popular Support for Democracy

In the last few years, public opinion polls worldwide actively report on the reducing share of citizens who express their strong and unambiguous support for democracy as the best form of governance; those who prefer democracy over alternative forms of governance, frequently add that the political system in their country would benefit from a contribution by "a strong leader" or "a board of experts", thus, suggesting both the decline in both the pro-democratic support and the quality of democracies worldwide. Survey evidence is supplemented by the experts’ evaluations used to label more and more countries as "flawed democracies". Can the observed trends be unilaterally identified as the decline of democracy? Which are the main causes and consequences for the reduction in pro-democratic support? This panel focuses on a variety of issues dealing with the popular support for democracy and preference for the alternative forms of governance; origins and factors of the aspirations for democracy; confidence in political institutions and political participation and their contribution to the democratic support; validity and reliability of the existing measures of democratic support; population surveys vs expert evaluations of the quality of democracy and the type of regime; over-time trends in the popular support for democracy and their interpretations. We invited papers that employ survey and public opinion research data, among the others from the World Values Survey, one of the world's largest and longest global survey research program operating since 1981. Political culture and attitudes towards democracy constitute a core segment of the WVS research agenda. WVS questionnaire includes around 100 measures characterizing political culture and attitudes to democracy.