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

In this issue, Dahlum and Knutsen (D&K) claim to disprove the emancipatory theory of democracy proposed by Inglehart and Welzel (I&W).1 This theory posits that rising emphasis on universal freedoms, or what I&W call ‘emancipative values’, is a major force driving the emergence and survival of democracy. To support their claim, D&K impute country scores to emancipative values for years in which real data are absent.2 These imputations allow them to produce a time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) database, consisting of some 2,000 country-year observations.3 Running panel regressions over these data, D&K find that a population’s emphasis on emancipative values in a given year has no effect on its level of democracy in the next year. D&K believe that this result invalidates I&W’s theory, in which case the values of a population are irrelevant for whether it attains and sustains democracy. We appreciate this contribution because it provides a welcome opportunity to pinpoint some pitfalls of TSCS frameworks. To do so, we proceed in three steps. First, we describe the problem with TSCS data in conceptual terms; then we illustrate the problem with a simulation; finally we demonstrate what real data say about I&W’s theory. We conclude that the evidence supports the emancipatory theory of democracy as powerfully as it did in I&W’s original analyses.