ABSTRACT
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 chapter analyzes data from World Values Surveys/European Values Surveys and finds 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. It demonstrates that economic development does tend to bring changes in culture and social structure that make the emergence and survival of democracy more likely. The correlations between mass attitudes and democracy are systematically higher when one use the longer period because political culture is a better predictor of the long-term stability of democracy than it is of a society's level of democracy at any given point in time.
