Assignment

Department of IR

Name: Muhammad Hassan

Roll No:
Subject Title: Approaches and Theory of
IR
Topic: Liberalism in western
democracies

Submitted to: Adnan

Nawaz

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 Table of Content

Abstract……………………………………………
…. 03

Introduction……………………………………….
03

Could cultural liberalism help explain the East–

West democracy divide in Europe?.. 05

Research on cultural support for liberal

democracy… 07

Cultural liberalism…………………………. 08

Hypotheses………………………………… 09

Democracy in Europe under a period of stress:

2012–2021…………………………………… 10

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Independent variable: proportion of cultural
liberals (PCL) – an individual-level metric derived
from the European social survey ………. 11

References……………………………….. 17

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 ABSTRACT
While all European democracies have been subject to the ‘stress test’ of the global rise of
illiberal populism, institutional erosion has occurred mainly in the East. Several qualitative
analyses have claimed that the weakness of liberalism explains democratic vulnerability in
the region. Seeking inspiration and quantitative data, we turn to the research field of global
support for democracy, which has always started from the assumption that it is through
cultural change rather than institutional reform that democracy takes root. By melding
empirical strategies from this field with insights from democratic theory, we present a new
and more exacting measure of cultural liberalism. We extract individual-level data from the
European Social Survey to measure the effect of the ‘Proportion of Cultural Liberals’ (PCL)
within national cohorts on levels of (de)democratization between and within East and West
Europe 2012–2021. We find that PCL is positively correlated with increasing democracy
levels (and resistance to democratic backsliding) across Europe. More significantly, this
relationship holds independently for both Eastern and Western Europe, with the PCL effect
being stronger in the East.

Introduction

The past decade has been a turbulent one in modern European politics, both for the older,
more longstanding democracies of the West and the more recently democratized post-
Communist states of the East. While an earlier period of democratization in those parts of
post-Communist Europe destined for EU membership was assessed to be successful on the
basis of institutional criteria (Ekiert et al., Citation2007, p. 20), the factor most often blamed
for these subsequent democratic stresses – illiberal populism – is an essentially ideational
force (Müller, Citation2013) of a kind neither anticipated nor easily addressed in the legal-
institutional sphere. To address such challenges, scholars are increasingly examining the
deliberative socio-cultural spheres in which political identities are forged in ways that either
chime or conflict with liberal democratic norms.(Alexander,G.2001,Theoritical
Politics,13(3))
Most existing cultural-discursive accounts of (de)democratization in Europe are qualitative in
orientation (Dawson & Hanley, Citation2016, Citation2019; Rechel, Citation2008; Sasse,
Citation2008). To explore whether quantitative support may be found for cultural-discursive
understandings of democratization, we turn for inspiration to recent research on global
support for democracy, a paradigm that has always started from the assumption that it is
through cultural change rather than institutional reform that democracy takes root. Much of
this research is global and macro-historical in scope (Cho, Citation2014; Dalton et al.,
Citation2007; Shin & Kim, Citation2018; Welzel, Citation2013), helping to explain why it is
seldom cited in attempts to understand why democracy has held up somewhat better in, say,

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Slovenia than Hungary. It is for this reason that we have sought to recalibrate this research
agenda, both theoretically and empirically, to explore whether levels of cultural support for
liberal democracy have measurable effects in Europe over the short-to-medium term.
The aim of this paper is two-fold. In the first instance, it seeks to theoretically justify, then
construct and operationalize a measure to identify cultural liberals as individuals from the
European Social Survey, a pan-European dataset. Broadly congruent with the new cleavages
literature, we conceptualize Cultural Liberals as ‘supporters of the new social movements’
(Bornschier, Citation2010), noting that many of these causes – ethnic and sexual minority
rights in particular – have subsequently been codified as part of the liberal democratic
template. In the second instance, it tests the relationship between the ‘Proportion of Cultural
Liberals’ (PCL) within national cohorts and levels of democratization/democratic regression
between and within East and West Europe 2012–2021 as measured by V-Dem and Freedom
House.
We find that PCL is strongly positively correlated with democracy levels in the pooled pan-
European sample. This is relatively unsurprising given that Europe may be divided into a
Western half where the gradual triumph of social movements in societies has led to the
institutionalization of corresponding liberal democratic institutional forms and an Eastern half
where the adoption of these same culturally liberal institutional forms was more recent and
was more driven by external forces. The strength and direction of the relationship in the
pooled sample is mostly driven by the differential performance of West European cases on
the one hand – where PCL and democracy levels are high – and East European cases on the
other – where PCL is lower and levels of democracy generally either remain middling or fall
over the period of analysis.
When examining Eastern and Western Europe as separate regions, however, we find that the
positive and statistically significant relationship between the percentage of cultural liberals
and democratization holds in both. In Western Europe, the effect, as befits a region consisting
of long-standing democracies, is smaller than in the newer and more volatile democratizing
states of Eastern Europe, where the PCL effect is larger and stronger. Over a decade
characterized by many political scientists as one of ‘democratic backsliding’ and explained by
some in terms of the loss of ‘EU leverage’ after the Accession of most of that region into the
EU during the 2000s, we argue that larger proportions of committed cultural liberals among
national populations help to explain where democracy has held up better and that smaller
proportions of cultural liberals correspond to where it has collapsed more dramatically.
This article is structured as follows. First, we review existing literature on the link between
culture and democracy in Europe. After that, we consider the possibility that recent
developments in survey research on global support for democracy could add empirical grist
to this hitherto mainly qualitative research paradigm. Taking inspiration from both the
emancipative values thesis and agonistic democratic theory, we present a new and more
exacting measure of cultural liberalism. After presenting our findings, the discussion
considers the relevance of the findings to debates about the East–West democracy divide in
Europe.(Ananda,A.&Bol,D.2021 International journal of public openion research33(2))

Could cultural liberalism help explain the East–West democracy divide in Europe?

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While democracies in both halves of the continent have been touched by a ‘global rise in
illiberal populism’ (Müller, Citation2013), it is among the Eastern members of the European
Union that democracy scores have been regressing fastest (Sedelmeier, Citation2023).
Following on from a strand in the democratic transitions scholarship cautioning that
institutions are only as strong as their support in wider society dictates (Alexander,
Citation2001), we explore whether at least part of the explanation for both this East–West gap
and intra-regional variation lies in cultural support for the dimensions of liberal democracy
most likely to conflict with majoritarian interests.

Starting with Bornschier’s (Citation2010) definition of ‘cultural liberalism’ as ‘support for the
goals of the New Social Movements’, advocating peace, gender equality, opposition to racism
and so on, it is evident from survey analyses that these kinds of political identities have much
deeper roots in the Western half of Europe (Pew, Citation2018). The starkness of this divide
may be illustrated nowhere better than by a mapped data visualization showing the spread of
the Twitter hashtag #RefugeesWelcome on 3rd September 2015. Western Europe up to the
old Iron Curtain was a thousand points of light; Eastern Europe was dark (Hanley,
Citation2015; Differential East–West political responses to European Refugee Crisis are
covered in Schweiger, Citation2023).

While the label ‘cultural liberalism’ emerges from ‘new cleavages’ research on West
European politics, the impetus for considering the role of these kinds of political identities in
upholding democracy comes from the democratization literature focussed on East-Central
Europe (ECE).Footnote1 Despite significant analytical differences, both rationalist and
cultural-discursive traditions typically attribute parts of the causal story to cultural factors.

In outline terms, the influential rational institutionalist account ran as follows. By offering the
carrot of incentives (ultimately adding up to membership, known to bring financial rewards)
and the stick of sanctions (pushing a candidate further back in the queue), the EU was
successfully able to manipulate the utility calculations of domestic East Central-European
politicians and publics to the extent that convergence upon a common liberal democratic
institutional settlement was achieved (Börzel & Risse, Citation2012; Grabbe, Citation2006;
Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier, Citation2005; Vachudova, Citation2005).

Despite this analytical emphasis on formal institutional structures, these accounts do not
exclude the possibility that cultural-ideal factors may constitute some part of the analytical
model. In fact, the importance of cultural factors was very frequently affirmed. Ekiert, Kubik
and Vachudova’s oft-cited account of the success of EU-led democratization is haunted by
repeated exhortations that these democratized states still need to develop ‘a proper
democratic culture’ (Ekiert et al., Citation2007). With respect to the question of how
democratic institutions would endure absent EU leverage after accession, many borrowed
from the culturalist lexicon, as with frequent invocations of elite and mass ‘socialization’

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(Levitz & Pop-Eleches, Citation2010). In this vein, Schimmelfennig envisaged a shift over
time from liberal-democratic norm-compliance based on cost–benefit calculation towards a
more thoroughgoing commitment, ultimately adding up to identity change (Citation2007).

Cultural-discursive accounts actually foregrounded socio-cultural and experiential elements

of democratization where rationalist accounts saw these elements as secondary to EU-
leverage-induced institutional reforms. In general, this approach led to much greater
scepticism with respect to the extent of democratization achieved (Alexander, Citation2001;
Hughes et al., Citation2004). For example, Sasse’s account of minority rights reform in the
Baltic states highlighted that the optimistic hopes of rationalist authors for elite socialization
were contradicted by available evidence (Sasse, Citation2008). More emphatically, Rechel
reported that while formal compliance with the EU’s minority rights regime had proved
enough to achieve accession, it was not noticeably altering the conditions under which the
region’s minorities lived (Rechel, Citation2008).

In recent years, authors in the rationalist tradition have tended to recognize that some degree
of democratic backsliding has taken place, but to stress that the region presents a mixed
picture beyond the two most dramatic backsliding cases of Hungary and Poland (Börzel &
Schimmelfennig, Citation2017; Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier, Citation2020; Sedelmeier,
Citation2023).

Among cultural-discursive accounts, on the other hand, there is widely shared agreement on
the region-wide character of democratic malaise. The key point of debate concerns whether to
describe this malaise as ‘backsliding’, which many do, stressing key weaknesses in spheres
such as civic participation (Greskovits, Citation2015) and deliberation (Gora & de Wilde,
Citation2022). Others have argued that the shared assumption behind both rationalist
scholarship and the EU’s conditionality model of democratization – that voters and elites in
the East were only wedded to liberal democratic norms to the extent that they were externally
constrained to do so – brings into question the very notion that these states had successfully
democratized in the first place (Dawson & Hanley, Citation2016; Herman, Citation2016).

Despite this widespread invocation of ‘culture’ as a causal variable across these theoretical
divides in research on ECE democratization, there has been little cross-fertilization of ideas
with the mainstream literature on ‘global support for democracy’, a mostly quantitative
research paradigm that is already closely trained on the socio-cultural sphere of
democratizing societies. We feel it is representative, for example, that none of the authors in
the cultural-discursive tradition cited above make reference to survey research on support for
democracy.
Part of this reluctance is likely to stem from a clash between the constructivist philosophical
commitments of cultural-discursive democratization scholars and the positivist roots of much
‘values survey’ research in modernization theory (after Inglehart, Citation1971). Despite this,
it is undeniable that there remains a certain ‘family resemblance’ between the philosophically

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inspired assumption that democracy needs to be ‘reflected in the ideas that people hold and
value’ (Blokker, Citation2009, p. 4) and the statistically supported claims of values survey
scholars like Christian Welzel

Research on cultural support for liberal democracy

Recent research on support for democracy, we argue, provides some tools to help us
understand the extent to which ideal and cultural factors may impact upon the stability of
European democracies. However, while techniques designed to produce global and macro-
historical claims about democracy might be useful for identifying divergences between East
and West Europe, they need to be recalibrated, both theoretically and empirically, if they are
also to be of use in helping us to understand why democracy might be holding up better in
say, Slovenia rather than Hungary.

Since an earlier generation of values research stressed near universal support for democracy
even in authoritarian countries (Klingemann, Citation1999; Norris, Citation1999), increasing
attention has been paid by values researchers to subjective understandings of democracy. In
this vein, values researchers now often find that citizen’s declared support for democracy is
much less substantive than previously thought (Ananda & Bol, Citation2021; Shin,
Citation2017); citizens of non-democratic countries, while generally professing support for
democracy, are either ‘unable to differentiate democracy from its alternatives’ (Shin & Kim,
Citation2018, p. 243), more likely to associate it with ‘a prospering economy and social
control’ (Zagrebina, Citation2020), or simply liable to revert the meaning of support for
democracy to support for authoritarianism (Cho, Citation2014; Ulbricht, Citation2018).

One attempt to grapple with subjective meanings of democracy has been the inclusion, since
early this century, of an open-ended question on the World Values Survey that presents
respondents with the incomplete sentence ‘Democracy means … ’, allowing them fill in up to
three concepts that they associate with democracy. Very frequently, it seems, respondents
have chosen to fill in this section with ideas like ‘liberty’, ‘freedom’ and ‘saying whatever
you want’ (Canache, Citation2012, p. 8). Thus, some of the early findings from analyses of
this questionnaire item echoed earlier democratic optimism in reporting that liberal
understandings of democracy predominate even in authoritarian corners of the globe
(Canache, Citation2012, p. 1; Dalton et al., Citation2007).

However, the association of terms like ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ with liberal understandings of
democracy establishes a very imprecise standard (Schaffer, Citation2014). Such findings are
of limited use for understanding whether citizens in a given part of the world could or could
not live with minority rights or judicial restraints on elected leaders.

Cultural liberalism: a more exacting measure of cultural support for liberal democracy

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Given the more geographically – and time-limited scope of this investigation relating to
short-term (de-)democratization in Europe, we find it necessary to conceptualize ‘cultural’
support for democracy more concretely in terms of support for specific liberal-democratic
norms. In short, we seek to find citizens who support and can potentially uphold those
institutional elements of liberal democracy which, though already codified as part of the
template and measured by most institutionally focussed databases, may be seen as vulnerable
because they conflict with majoritarian political and social norms.

We use European Social Survey’s 2012 special section on ‘Understandings of Democracy’,

the most theoretically sophisticated battery of questions on the topic to date (Quaranta,
Citation2018, p. 7). In choosing the questions, we have sought to be as parsimonious as
possible, limiting ourselves to six questions by avoiding ‘valence’ questions that target such
overwhelmingly popular features of democracy as elections. We further take for granted that
even Post-Communist Europe appears near the top of the global table on dimensions such as
support for female leaders and rejection of ‘strong [authoritarian] leadership’ (Anderson et
al., Citation2022). Accordingly, we focus in particular on anti-majoritarian norms that usually
turn out to be the aspects of democracy that are often hard to institute where absent and likely
to require energetic defence where present (Dawson & Hanley, Citation2016).

As such, five of the six ESS items we have chosen to identify individuals as ‘Cultural
Liberals’ (CL) – protection of LGBT (1) and minority rights (2), protection of opposition (3)
and media freedom (4), support for the court’s role as a checking mechanism against the state
(5) – are chosen so as to demonstrate support for the potentially anti-majoritarian liberal
institutional norms most likely to lapse. Another way to express this is that all these items
serve to guarantee the core liberal democratic norm of pluralism, a norm is assailed on
several fronts in the wave of illiberal populism that has driven democratic volatility in the
early decades of this century.Footnote2 Furthermore, by insisting on emphatic support for
each of these norms to qualify as CL, which is to say fulfilment of all criteria rather than
using the items to generate means, we guard against the likelihood that CL support for
democracy melts away when it is needed most. Given this imperative for mobilization-
readiness, the sixth ESS item that completes our criteria for Cultural Liberalism is ‘Interest in
Politics’, which we use as our ‘activity’ filter because it is the least imperfect fit with the
Aristotelian notion of political action underpinning deliberative theory (see Arendt,
Citation2013 [Citation1958]).Footnote3

Hypotheses

Our main research question is as follows: Does the proportion of cultural liberals (PCL) in a
national population affect democratization over the course of the past decade (2012–2021)?
In our use of the terms democratization and its derivatives like de-democratization (or
democratic backsliding), we are following usage that is common in research on comparative

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European politics, less so in research on global support for democracy. By democratization,
we mean any increase in democracy levels, even at the incremental level that does not
involve crossing a threshold from one regime-type to another. By de-democratization (or
democratic backsliding), we mean any decrease in democracy levels. We argue that there is a
positive relationship between the proportion of committed cultural liberals within a
population and levels of democracy. We tested the following hypothesis:

H1: The higher the proportion of cultural liberals (PCL) in European societies, the higher the
level of democracy
However, the effect of PCL on democracy level is more likely to be stronger in political
environments where the framework of liberal democracy, especially its most progressive, anti
– majoritarian dimensions, is less historically embedded. That is, we expect that the effect of
PCL will be stronger in Eastern relative to Western Europe. As such, we tested this in our
second hypothesis:
H2: Having a higher proportion of cultural liberals (PCL) would have a larger and stronger
effect on increasing democracy levels in Eastern Europe compared to Western Europe

Democracy in Europe under a period of stress: 2012–2021

The ending of the main period of the EU’s democratic leverage prior to the beginning of our
period of observation has the effect of equalizing the external context against which the
effects of PCL on levels of democracy can be measured. Over the past decade, the whole
continent – Western Europe, the newer Eastern members of the EU and Eastern non-members
– can be understood as sharing a common context in which liberal democracy is experiencing
a global stress test arising from the fallout of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2009
(inclusive of the ensuing Eurozone crisis) and the related wave of illiberal populism. It is for
this reason – relatively equal external context – that we do not constrict our dataset to omit
non-EU cases; thus, Switzerland and Norway fit into the West category while Russia, Ukraine
and Albania fit into the East.

Independent variable: proportion of cultural liberals (PCL) – an individual-level metric

derived from the European social survey

The Special Section on ‘Understandings of Democracy’ in the 2012 European Social Survey
(ESS) asks respondents to answer ‘how important’ certain norms are to democracy, allowing
an individual-level scale to be constructed. In essence, we seek to find citizens who support
and can potentially uphold those institutional elements of liberal democracy which, though
already codified as part of the template and measured by most institutionally focussed
databases, may be seen as vulnerable because they conflict with majoritarian political and
social norms.

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In formulating a country-level PCL measurement, we implemented three steps. First, we
select six individual-level components to identify cultural liberals as individuals: protection
of LGBT and minority rights, protection of opposition and media freedom, support for the
court’s role as a checking mechanism against the government, and interest in politics (α =
0.71).Footnote6 As described above, we insist on (emphatic) agreement with each item to
qualify as CL. In formulating ‘cultural liberalism’ this way, we include some who would not
self-identify as ‘liberals’ and exclude many who would. We prioritize citizens’ function
relative to (de)democratization over self-ascribed labels or, for that matter, voting patterns,
which often, in the European context, reflect economic policy orientations.

Second, we transform the variables, which use different measures, into binary variables: 1
represents individuals who indicate strong preference or agreement with the item statement
while 0 represents the remaining individuals. We then multiply all six binary variables to
create a cultural liberalism scale with 1 representing individuals who show strong preference
or agreement on every component and 0 representing all other preferences. We then divide
the total number of culturally liberal individuals by the total number of sampled respondents
per country to estimate the proportion of cultural liberals within the population of each
country. For example, we took the number of cultural liberals in Albania (n = 147) and divide
it by the total number of Albanians sampled (n = 1,087), which gives us an (unweighted)
estimation of 13.52 per cent proportion of cultural liberals (PCL). The calculation is repeated
for the remaining 25 countries. The overall mean of PCL in the pooled sample is 19.88 per
cent.

Overall, our sample confirms our assumption that PCL levels will be higher in West Europe
compared to the Post-Communist East. Scandinavian states like Denmark (46.32) and
Sweden (38.43) as well as Germany (40.14) cluster at the most culturally liberal end of the
pooled sample while Post-Communist states Ukraine (3.68) and (perhaps surprisingly)
Lithuania (1.65) are found to be least culturally liberal. There is a substantial and significant
difference in PCL between the two regions. T-tests further confirm that the 16.72-point inter-
region difference is statistically significant at p < 0.001. The focus on this East–West divide
however, masks substantial intra-regional variation, some of which is noteworthy – for
example, Bulgaria, Poland and Slovenia record close to the pan-European mean while
Portugal and Cyprus report significantly below. Indeed, it is the fact of this substantial intra-
regional variation that allows us to consider the relationship of cultural liberalism with intra-
regional variation in democratic performance, that is particularly pronounced in ECE
(Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier, Citation2020). Table 1 below shows the distribution of PCL
per country and region

Dependent variable: levels of democracy

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We focused on country-level democratic scores spanning 2012–2021 from two datasets (see
Table 2). The first dependent variable is the Liberal Democracy Index from Varieties of
Democracy (V-Dem), which consists of polyarchy and liberal democracy components. The
second DV is Freedom House’s (FH) expert evaluation of political rights and civil liberties.

Discussion and conclusions

In outline, the theoretical rationale for quantifying the Proportion of Cultural Liberals (PCL)
in a country was as follows. The democratic template most often applied in contemporary
Europe references some majoritarian and overwhelmingly popular institutions such as
elections. However, it also mandates a set of liberal institutions that are partly designed to
check majoritarian impulses: judicial independence, media independence, and the rights of
ethnic and sexual minorities. If one starts from the proposition that democratic institutions are
only liable ‘to enjoy stability and longevity’ to the extent that people identify with the norms
embodied by them (Blokker, Citation2009, pp. 1–4), then liberal democracy really ought to
hold up better where a higher proportion of citizens are ‘cultural liberals’ in the exacting
sense that they are ready to uphold its anti-majoritarian elements. The statistical analyses
described above suggest that this intuition is basically correct.

This analysis reveals a positive and statistically significant relationship between the
proportion of cultural liberals in a given national population and democracy levels across
Europe. Furthermore, our results show differential effects of PCL on democracy levels, with
Eastern Europe benefiting more from increasing PCL than Western Europe. The effects are
statistically significant and robust to the introduction of control variables. This suggests that
this relationship is not merely an artefact of the different historical trajectories of the Western
and Post-Communist regions of Europe. These results allow for some elaboration with
respect to how cultural support bolsters liberal democracy in general and how this impacts
upon debates surrounding an East–West divide in Europe.

Though our database covers only Europe, we consider it is very likely that cultural liberals –
understood in the exacting activist and anti-majoritarian terms identified in this project – do
not form an absolute majority in any country. However, this does not mean they cannot
triumph – especially in the West after World War II, social movements in favour of causes
such as gender equality, civil rights, and environmental action have successfully expanded
‘the democratic horizon’ (Brunkert et al., Citation2019) despite not enjoying the support of
electoral majorities. Despite the gradual growth in support across the West for these basic
ideas, it remains an activist minority that effectively guarantees the gains won by these
movements in the face of opposition that often has the weight of majoritarian electoral
support behind them. According to this model then, and in stark opposition to a political
science orthodoxy stressing the perils of polarization (after Sartori, Citation2005
[Citation1976]), it is the culturally liberal ‘counter-public’ that both makes and keeps liberal

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democracy ‘liberal’ in the ‘advanced democracies’ in our study like Denmark, Germany and,
to a lesser extent, the UK.Footnote8

A Taxonomy of Political Regimes

We define liberal democracy as a regime in which civil rights are provided in addition to
electoral and property rights. We model civil rights in turn as the non-discriminatory
provision of public goods. We interpret the relevant public goods broadly, including justice
and free-speech rights as well as education, health, and infrastructure. What sets liberal
democracy apart from electoral democracy in our framework is that an elected government
cannot discriminate against specific individuals or groups when it administers justice,
protects basic rights such as freedom of assembly and free speech, provides for collective
security, or distributes economic and social benefits.
Our treatment has the advantage that it provides a tractable approach for modeling
liberal democracy and distinguishing it from other political regimes. Thinking of liberalism
broadly as non-discrimination allows us to sidestep debates about what are the "essential"
characteristics of liberalism. The principle of non-discrimination captures a substantial
number of liberalism's characteristics, even if not all of them.
More specifically, our public good framework can be given concrete meaning in a number of
different ways. Rights of habeas corpus for an individual or aggrieved minority imply non-
discrimination in the administration of justice. Equal access to education, as in black girls
being allowed to attend schools in Alabama in the 1960s, requires non-discrimination in
education. Equal access by, say, South African blacks, to parks or public transport implies
non-discrimination in public infrastructure. Protecting the freedom of expression of a
minority (e.g press freedom for Kurdish newspapers in Turkey) is tantamount to non-
discrimination in speech rights. Our formulation is general enough to encapsulate individual
and minority rights - insofar as an individual constitutes a minority group of size one.
Furthermore, it is sufficiently flexible that it can be applied to different country, cultural and
historical contexts.
Our distinction between electoral and liberal democracies relies on the presumption
that free and fair elections - the hallmark of electoral democracy - can be separated from
equal treatment and non-discrimination - the hallmarks of liberalism. It is possible to have
one without having the other. This presumption can be criticized. It may be difficult at times
to disentangle certain civil rights from political rights. In particular, it can be argued that
elections cannot be entirely fair when the capacity of citizens to participate and compete in
elections is constrained - indirectly - by restrictions on their civil rights.This criticism has
some validity. But we take it as a caution about the fuzziness in practice between electoral
and liberal democracies, rather than an objection that renders our distinction between the two
regimes entirely invalid. Obviously, when discrimination in the provision of basic public
goods is so extreme that it tilts the electoral playing field decisively in the direction of some
groups, one cannot talk of democracy of any kind. But to require equality of access across the
full range of public goods as a precondition for free and fair elections would also set too high
a threshold. We treat electoral democracy as a particular kind of flawed democracy, where the

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electoral majority gets to trample on the rights of the minority. We mentioned in the
Introduction some of the notable examples we have in mind: Russia, Hungary, or Turkey.
We now describe our taxonomy. We shall distinguish among different types of political
regimes, based on the combinations of property/political/civil rights that are provided. For
simplicity, let us assume that we can treat each of these rights in a binary, all-or-none fashion;
they are either protected or not. This gives us eight possible combinations in all, shown in
Table 1.
A regime in which none of these rights is protected is either a personal dictatorship, or
an anarchy where the state has no authority (box 1). If property rights are protected but there
are no political or civil rights, the regime is under the control of an oligarchic elite and can be
described as a right-wing autocracy (box 5). A regime that provides political rights but not
property or civil rights would be controlled by the effective majority, resembling perhaps
Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat (box 2). A regime that provides only civil rights, on the
other hand, is hard to imagine - the only box for which we are at a loss for label (box 3).
Consider now political regimes that provide two out of our three sets of rights. When
property rights are missing but political and civil rights are provided (box 4), we get a
democratic version of communism - what Marx had in mind for the long run (even though
communist regimes turned out quite differently in practice). When political rights are missing
but property and civil rights are protected (box 7), we have what we might call a "liberal
autocracy." Until the extension of the franchise to most males in the late 19th century, Britain
stood as an example of this type of regime. There are few, if any contemporary variants (see
below). When civil rights are missing but property and political rights are protected, we have
electoral or illiberal democracies. As we argued in the introduction, a large share of today's
democracies, particularly in the developing world, are in this category.

Historical discussion and country cases

We now provide some historical context and a few country vignettes to illustrate and
enrich our conceptual framework.
It has become common to treat "liberal democracy" as a single political package. But its
two ingredients have different origins, social bases, and political implications (Plattner 2010,
Fukuyama 2014). As a system of thought, liberalism grew out of the Protestant reformation
and the religious wars that followed." It emphasized opposition to religious monopoly,
tolerance, and equal treatment by the state regardless of religious beliefs (Ryan 2012, p. 7).
Its first important political victory was the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, in which
the landed gentry succeeded to place limits on the power of the sovereign, with the
subsequent Bill of Rights (1689) codifying those restraints. John Locke (1632-1704), who
lived through the Glorious Revolution, is considered the first important theorist of liberalism.
Classical liberalism reached its apogee with John Stuart Mill's (1806-1873) book On Liberty,
published in 1859.

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While democracy has roots in ancient Greece, its modern variant emerged out of the social
mobilization sparked by the Industrial Revolution in Britain and other parts of Western
Europe. As farmers moved to the cities and were transformed into factory workers, the
possibilities of mass collective action increased and organized labor became a political force.
The push for democracy during the 19* century was essentially a demand for the expansion
ofhe franchise to the non-propertied. This was a struggle that took a century or longer, with
universal suffrage achieved in Western Europe and its offshoots by the early to mid-twentieth
century. The role that industrialization - and the associated emergence of the bourgeoisie and
proletariat - played as the instigator of modern democracy is a common theme running
through accounts of democracy, from Barrington Moore's (1966) classic work to more recent
analyses of democratic transitions in Latin America and Southern Europe (Collier and
Mahoney 1997).
As this capsule history suggests, liberalism preceded electoral democracy in the West.
Early liberals were propertied elites, landed gentry, and wealthy taxpayers whose primary
objective was to prevent the crown from exercising arbitrary power over them. It was the rule
of law they were after - not the sharing of power with the masses. Indeed, classical theorists
of liberalism were quite nervous about expanding the franchise and worried about its
consequences. Government was too important to be left to common people, whose judgment
was fickle and untrustworthy. And contemporary developments seemed to justify their fears.
In France, the extension of the vote to all males in 1848 enabled Louis Napoleon to woo the
peasantry and paved the way for his personal dictatorship. Alexis de Tocqueville had written
disparagingly about the "tyranny of the majority" in the United States. Mill picked up on de
Tocqueville's discussion and argued that the principles he enunciated in On Liberty "did not
apply to people who could not benefit from rational discussion" (Ryan 2012, p. 29). Among
such people were the populations of 16th century Britain, 18th century Russia, and of course
the Indians of his day (over whom Mill took a hand in ruling as an official of the East India
Company).
The fact that early liberals in the West were in large part the wealthy property-owning
elite led to the bundling, in the minds of subsequent analysts, of two kinds of distinct rights:
property rights and civil rights. The opponents of absolutism by the crown and the church
were after both sets of rights. This peculiar, and peculiarly British, history does not fit the
experience of other, especially non-Western countries very well. In particular, the elite would
often turn out to be interested primarily in property rights. Civil rights were for others, chiefly
ethnic, religious, or other minorities.
This conflation of property and civil rights can be seen in T.H. Marshall's (1949) classic
account of the historical development of rights. Marshall divides rights into three categories:
he argues civil rights came first, followed by political, and then social rights. His political
rights category aligns with ours as it refers largely to rights deriving from the franchise. His
social rights refer to benefits provided by the state under welfare state arrangements. His civil
rights, meanwhile, encompass both our property and civil rights. For Marshall, protection of
property rights was one of the rights necessary for individual freedom; it was of the same
nature as theprotection of free speech, non-discrimination on the basis religion, and the right
to justice. It is clear that Britain's history led Marshall and others to treat the pursuit of civil
rights as an elite project. By the time Somers (1994) reviews Marshall's treatment nearly half

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a century later, property rights is so taken for granted that it has dropped out of Marshall's
definition of civil rights.
When Western liberals eventually came to accept democracy, it was, as Fawcett (2014)
portrays it, a grudging concession. Fawcett writes of the decades between 1880 and 1914 as
the period in which liberals made peace with democracy. As part of the compromise, liberals
gave their support to the expansion of the franchise. They yielded to popular sovereignty over
domains such as education and ethics in which they previously had a monopoly. In return,
they hoped that popular forces would accept "liberal limits on the authority of the people's
will" (Fawcett 2014, 144). Thus was born liberal democracy.
However, one of the predictable consequences of mass franchise was that liberals proper lost
power to mass based political forces. In Britain the Liberal Party experienced a dramatic
decline before World War I as the Labor Party gained ground, and would henceforth be
condemned to remain a third party at best. In Germany, by the 1890s the liberals were
"squeezed between the world's largest, best organized labor movement and the world's
largest, best organized Catholic Party" (Fawcett 2014, 170). Mass democracy in time also
generated justifications for itself - such as the "national will" or the "vanguard party" of the
proletariat --that departed significantly from liberal tenets (Müller 2011, p. 3). During the
interwar period, economic depression greatly accelerated the decline of liberalism. Mass
based political movements steeped on the highly illiberal ideologies of fascism and
communism swept through continental Europe.
But liberal democracy would experience a rebirth in the West after the Second World
War. Part of it was of course the discrediting of fascism and Nazism. But in countries where
liberalism had preceded democracy, liberal democracy would prove remarkably resilient. The
welfare states of the postwar era were based on a very different type of bargain between
employers and employees - providing the latter with much expanded social rights - but they
were constructed on the same elite/working-class cleavage that had instigated the 19**
century rise of democracy in the West. Some would say that these regimes had given up on
liberalism in expanding the economic and social powers of the state. But judged by criteria
such as the rule of law, non-discrimination, and equality in the distribution of public goods,
the welfare states of Europe and North America were indeed liberal democracies.

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