Political culture vs. rational choice: support for democracy in Serbia

Abstract

This paper deals with some predictors of the general support for democracy in the light of the two competing models, cultural and rational choice, which have different implications for the possibility of the development of mass support for democracy in former communist societies. The paper aims at clarifying the importance of certain “institutional” and “cultural” variables for the general support for democracy in Serbia. The data used in the paper were collected in the post-election survey, conducted after the May 2012 parliamentary and presidential elections on a representative sample of Serbian citizens (N=1,568). The relative importance of 15 predictors was analyzed: the socio-demographic variables (respondent’s gender, age, educational level, monthly household income), the institutional variables (satisfaction with Serbian democracy and economy, evaluation of the government performance before the election, the perceived level of respect for individual freedom and the quality of voters’ view representation in elections) and the cultural variables (political tolerance, authoritarianism, nationalism and socialist egalitarianism). In the hierarchical regression analysis, the general support for democracy was first regressed on socio-demographic variables, then the cultural variables were added as well as the institutional variables in the final step. Each model had a greater explanatory power, significantly increasing the explained percent of variance. The most important predictors of support for democracy were satisfaction with Serbian democracy (β=.12, p<.001) and evaluation of government performance (β=.23, p<.001); the citizens who were more satisfied with democracy and more inclined to positively evaluate the government performance were more supportive of democracy. The concluding part discusses the implications of the obtained results for the development of democratic political culture and consolidation of democratic institutions in a transitional society