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

Although modernization theory would predict that societies with increasing economic
capacities show more distinct patterns in the spread of elite-challenging activities, the
figure largely supports that elite-challenging activities are most prevalent among those
societies where resources are abundant. It should also be noted that among the societies
that the World Bank classified as upper-middle income societies, more than half of them
are new democracies in former communist regimes. As will be shown later, most of these
societies have experienced a decline in elite-challenging activities after extraordinary
high levels of mass activities during the transition period, so this might explain why the
differences between societies in the two middle-income categories are not more
pronounced.
As a consequence of this differentiation, the next grouping of societies acknowledges that
societies are not only determined by their socioeconomic development. Rather, what
people think and how people act is also shaped by their cultural heritage that tends to
have a rather stable impact (Inglehart and Welzel 2005: 19). As, in particular, “the
collapse of communism did not create a tabula rasa by erasing people’s prior experiences;
rather, those very experiences influence people’s current behavior” (Howard 2003: 105),
it makes sense to control for people’s exposure to communist rule during their
socialization phase. However, not only did the rigidity of the communist rule differ
among the countries of the former socialist bloc. Also traditions prior to the communist
regimes varied – some of the societies, in particular in Central Europe, are rooted in
Western Christian traditions (such as Hungary or Slovakia), while in others, in particular
in Southern Eastern Europe and among the post-soviet societies, people have been
closely connected to various Christian-Orthodox churches or to Islamic religion. The
Baltic states have been exceptional cases within the former Soviet Union, as they were
the only Soviet republics with a Western Christian tradition.
Figure 5-3, combining both socioeconomic and cultural factors, displays differences in
levels of elite-challenging activities between postindustrial democracies, four different
groups of post-communist societies, Latin American societies, other developing societies,
and low-income societies.
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