Institutional Effects on DemocraticSupport:Divers effects on diverse dimensions.

The paper proposed here aims at unraveling the effects of political institutions on public’s support for democracy. Many students of democratization have regarded public support for democracy as one of the quintessential elements leading a country to democratic consolidation. Countries without substantial level of public support for principles and practices of democratic politics has been degraded as merely “electoral” or “delegative” democracies even though they have competitive elections. Consolidated democracy can stand only on the culture in which ordinary citizens habitually believe in and behave according to the norms and rules of democracy. Some students of new institutionalism argue that certain institutions can encourage breeding higher levels of public support for democracy than others (Anderson and Guillory 1997; Norris 1999). Focusing upon how institutions make winners and losers, their analyses show that more inclusive and consensus oriented institutions are better to produce more democratic support than majoritarian institutions. It is a very interesting finding broadening topics and knowledge of institutional engineering. However, previous studies have several problems. (1) Their cases are usually limited in western and matured democracies. (2) More significantly, they do not consider the recent achievement of the studies of democratic support: Public support for democracy is multidimensional and multidirectional. (3) Measuring institutional variable is very limited and too simplified. In this paper, using World Value Survey data and other the most recent datasets, not only do we increase the number of cases significantly including old and new democracies, but also we compose new indicators measuring institutions: executive systems, electoral systems and levels of decentralization. More importantly, we conceptually divide public support for democracy into four dimensions: supports for democratic principles, performance of democracy, democratic institutions and personnel in democratic government. Following Lijphart works (Lijphart 1999), we believe consensus oriented institutions due to their nature of inclusiveness are better tools to raise public support. Unlike previous works, however, we hypothesize that not only do each institution make diverse influences on public support but also they are differently embodied in each dimension of democratic support. Our project will reveals more complicated patterns of institutional impacts on democratic support, which has been hidden in the previous studies. Ultimately, it will contribute to enrich current theory and knowledge of institutional designing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]