Emancipative values and democracy: Response to Hadenius and Teorell

Abstract

This article demonstrates that Axel Hadenius and Jan Teorell’s attempt to disprove a causal effect of emancipative mass orientations on democracy is flawed in each of its three lines of reasoning. First, contrary to Hadenius and Teorell’s claim that measures of “effective democracy” end up in meaningless confusion of democracy and minor aspects of its quality, we illustrate that additional qualifications of democracy illuminate meaningful differences in the effective practice of democracy. Second, Hadenius and Teorell’s finding that emancipative orientations have no significant effect on subsequent measures of democracy from Freedom House is highly unstable: using only a slightly later measure of the dependent variable, the effect turns out to be highly signficant. Third, we illustrate that these authors’ analytical strategy is irrelevant to the study of democratization because the temporal specification they use misses almost all cases of democratization. We present a more conclusive model of democratization, analyzing how much a country moved toward or away from democracy as the dependent variable. The model shows that emancipative orientations had a strong effect on democratization during the most massive wave of democratization ever—stronger than any indicator of economic development. Finally, we illustrate a reason why this is so: emancipative orientations motivate emancipative social movements that aim at the attainment, sustenance, and extension of democratic freedoms.