Do Culture and Institutions Matter? Explaining the Sources of Cross‐National Regime Support

Abstract

What determines the level of popular support for regimes? There are two approaches to answering this question: one that emphasizes the role of culture in conditioning individuals' evaluations of political objects and another that emphasizes the importance of institutional arrangements in constraining and channeling individual behavior. I hypothesize that cross‐national variation in regime support is, in part, a consequence of an interaction between cultural values and institutional arrangements. The results indicate that the impact of culture on regime support is mediated by the institutional context. It is this insight that can help us to better understand where regime support originates.Related Articles Hiroi, Taeko, and Sawa Omori. 2013. “.” Politics & Policy 41 (): 39‐64. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12001/abstract Legler, Thomas. 2012. “.” Politics & Policy 40 (): 848‐870. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2012.00382.x/abstract Boehmer, Charles. 2007. “.” Politics & Policy 35 (): 774‐809. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2007.00084.x/abstract Related Media . 2013. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/index_html . 2013. http://www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/ Applebaum, Binyamin, and Robert Gebeloff. 2012. “.” New York Times. February 11. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/us/even‐critics‐of‐safety‐net‐increasingly‐depend‐on‐it.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0