Pitfalls in the Study of Democratization: Testing the Emancipatory Theory of Democracy

Dahlum and Knutsen (2015) claim to disprove the emancipatory theory of democracy proposed by Inglehart and Welzel. This theory posits that rising emancipative values are a major force driving the emergence and flourishing of democracies. Dahlum and Knutsen believe to falsify this claim by running panel regressions over a time-pooled cross-sectional database. Contrary to their claims, our re-analysis demonstrates that this type of regression analysis is inherently incapable to capture co-evolutionary dynamics that follow a "tectonic tension/eruption" model: rising emancipative values bring mass demands for democratic freedoms into a slowly growing tension with stagnant supplies of them, until a point is reached at which eruptive regime changes shift the supplies into equlibrium with the demands. We present fresh evidence showing that reality strongly conforms to this model, whose logic is beyond the comprehension of panel regressions. We conclude that the evidence supports the emancipatory theory of democracy as powerfully as it did in Inglehart and Welzel’s (2005) original analyses.