Participation and Democracy: Dynamics, Causes ... - Jacobs University

possibility is less easily reconcilable with the temporal order of our variables but it is not
entirely foreclosed.
So far, we have seen bivariate correlations between elite-challenging activities in around
2000 and measures of the level as well as the quality of democracy after 2001. In a final
step, empirical evidence will be provided showing that the causal direction in this
relationship is primarily operating from higher levels of elite-challenging activities on
more democratic and responsive elite behavior. In order to do so, survey data on elitechallenging
participation are measured at an even earlier point in time, now coming from
the earliest available survey, i.e. from the second and third wave of the World Value
Survey (1990-97). So the temporal order is controlled for more strictly, making sure that
the measurement of activism really precedes the measurement of democracy.
Now one could argue that, despite controlling for the temporal order of the two variables,
the impact of participation levels still reflects an artificial construct since these levels of
participation strongly depend on prior levels of democracy. Anticipating this objection,
Table 9-1 demonstrates that the relationship still holds after controlling for prior levels of
democracy as well, so after introducing some kind of a lagged dependent variable. 79 This
procedure partials out that part of elite-challenging actions that is generated by prior
democracy; it then looks at whether this independent part still has an effect on subsequent
democracy.
Table 9-1 includes two democracy measurements: the scale measuring Political Rights
and Civil Liberties by Freedom House, and the Control of Corruption measure from the
World Bank. The Polity Scale was not included as the zero-order correlation was already
rather weak. Transparency International’s CPI has a problem with data availability – as
for the World Bank indicator, measures are only available since the mid 1990ies, but for
CPI the number of countries covered in the early years was limited. The problem can,
however, be neglected as the two anti-corruption indicators show a correlation of r ≥
.90 *** .
79 Note that this is still the level of correlation analysis, even if one direction of the linkage is more
plausible than the other.
176