ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes data from World Values Surveys/European Values Surveys and shows that mass attitudes are correlated with the actual presence or absence of democracy at the societal level, but the effectiveness of given items varies a good deal, and many of them are relatively weak predictors. The World Values Surveys/European Values Surveys cover almost seventy societies, providing a sufficient number of cases to carry out statistically significant analyses of the empirical linkages between mass attitudes and a society's actual level of democracy. The political culture school argues that the values, beliefs, and skills of mass publics have an important impact on politics in general and on democratic institutions in particular. The literature on political culture and democracy implicitly assumes that a pro-democratic set of attitudes at the individual level is conducive to democratic institutions at the societal level. A growing body of evidence supports the view that political culture plays a key role in democratization.
