How do citizens perceive democracy and how does it correlate with political regimes? Findings based on a new taxonomy of perception of democracy

Democracy as an idea is under a constant argument. Various ideologies and theoretical schools clash to impose the ‘true’ meaning of this concept. Multiple research organization (e.g., European Social Survey, Varieties of Democracy Institute or World Value Study) around the globe monitor and analyse how the idea is perceived and manifested in social practice. The proposed paper contributes to the ongoing debate on multiple levels. Firstly, it proposes a new description and classification of common perceptions of democracy among citizens around the globe. Secondly, it explores the relationship between particular perceptions and types of political regimes worldwide. Thirdly it explores the relationship between given perceptions and country level specifics. The aim of the paper was achieved by the analysis of cross-country, cross-time data from 5th (2005-2009), 6th (2010-2014) and 7th (2017-2022) World Value Survey. Using clustering methods, it was possible to distinguish three perception types represented by the following groups: 1) Stabilizers, 2) Anti-statists and 3) Anti-authoritarians, the names of which represent the ways of perceiving democracy rather than reflect actual political preferences. We observed a relative stability of those groups in time, and we used a regime aggregation level to conduct a multinomial regression model to track the links between a type of political regime and a particular perception group. General results indicate a strong association between specific perception groups and types of regimes as classified by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. A detailed analysis indicated that: 1) full democracy countries are strongly associated with anti-authoritarian perception; 2) flawed democracies are very specific, because they do not reflect any unique relationship with any specific perception group, and thus prove to be the most diversified and interesting fields for any future predictions; 3) hybrid and authoritarian regimes are more associated with stabilizers and anti-statists; And 4) authoritarian regimes are mostly associated with stabilizers. Detailed discussion and conclusions are provided in the paper.