Introduction

SOME 2,400 YEARS AGO, ARISTOTLE (1995 [350 B.C.]) REASONED IN BOOK IV of Politics that democracy emerges in middle-class communities in which the citizens share an egalitarian participatory orientation. Since then theorists claimed repeatedly that the question of which political regime emerges and survives depends on the orientations that prevail among the people. Very explicit on this point, Montesquieu (1989 [1748]: 106) argued in De L’Esprit des Lois that the laws by which a society is governed reflect the people’s dominant mentality: whether a nation is constituted as a tyranny, monarchy or democracy depends, respectively, on the prevalence of anxious, honest or civic orientations. Likewise, Tocqueville (1994 [1835]: 29) postulated in De la Démocratie en Amérique that the flourishing of democracy in the United States reflects the liberal and participatory orientations among the American people.

In modern times, the failure of democracy in Weimar Germany was the most flagrant illustration of the idea that political regimes rest on compatible orientations among their people. Because this failure had such catastrophic consequences as the Holocaust and World War II, it troubled social scientists, psychologists, and public opinion researchers alike. Much of the research inspired by this break with civilization shared the premise that democracy is fragile when it is a “democracy without democrats” (Bracher 1971 [1955]). In this vein, Lasswell (1951: 473, 484, 502) claimed that democratic regimes emerge and survive where most of the population believes in the idea of people power that inspires democracy. Similarly, when Lipset (1959: 85-89) speculated why modernization is conducive to democracy he concluded that this is so because modernization changes mass orientations in ways that make people supportive of democratic principles, such as popular control over power. More recently, Huntington (1991: 69) argued that a rising desire for democratic freedoms is the mediating mechanism explaining why modernization has nurtured democratizing mass pressures in scores of countries in recent decades. Evidence for this mediation model has been presented by Welzel (2007: 417).

Most influential on this topic, Almond and Verba (1963: 498) and Eckstein (1966: 1) introduced the term ‘congruence’, claiming that political regimes become stable only to the extent to which their authority patterns satisfy people’s authority beliefs – “regardless of regime type,” as Eckstein (1998: 3) notes.