The World Value Survey (WVS) has recently completed its seventh wave of data collection, covering 58 countries over the period of 2017-2022. This series of posts will highlight some of the findings, using the same subset of countries. In the last post, I focused on the portion of respondents in each country who reported they enjoyed substantial freedom of choice and control over how their lives turn out. Surprisingly, respondents from autocratic countries did not seem to feel much less free than respondents from democratic countries. I speculated that a possible reason for this surprising survey result was that people from different countries may not view freedom the same way. For example, conceiving freedom as an absence of constraints versus having room to maneuver within constraints would likely lead to different self-reports.
This post will explore how WVS participants from different countries responded to two questions: 1). "Would you say having a democratic political system is very good, fairly good, fairly bad or very bad?" and 2). "How essential do you think [people obeying their rulers] is as a characteristic of democracy? Use this scale where 1 means 'not at all an essential characteristic of democracy' and 10 means it definitely is 'an essential characteristic of democracy'." Columns in the following chart represent the percent of respondents in each country who endorsed “very good” in response to the first question and ’10’ in response to the second.
The surprise here (at least for me) is the number of respondents who considered "obeying their rulers” as essential to democracy. I didn’t think democracies had rulers, which per Dictionary.com are sovereigns who exercise “supreme” authority, such as monarchs and emperors. Then again, meaning is much bigger than a dictionary definition. The discordant survey responses may have simply reflected different ideas about what a ruler is and does. Perhaps some respondents saw rulers as “those who make laws” and concluded that a citizenry that obeys laws is indeed essential for a functioning democracy. Which is not unreasonable.