Data Sheet 1_Measurement of democratic values: a cross-country comparison with ESS round 10.pdf

This study examines the measurement and cross-national comparability of democratic values utilizing the Citizens’ Models of Democracy scale included in the European Social Survey round 10. Given the ambiguous understanding of psychological constructs in empirical legitimacy research, we propose a conceptualization drawing on Norris’s framework of political support to facilitate a decisive operationalization of survey indicators. Acknowledging the challenges inherent in comparative research, we emphasize the intentional differentiation between social identities, values, and attitudes as the underlying constructs of measurement. Applying this framework to the study of political support, we conceptualize democratic values as the underlying measurement of support for regime principles and empirically assess whether and how associated latent structures can be discovered. As it remains unclear whether the scale is intended to capture value dimensions or types of value holders that are consistent across countries, we employ both variable- and person-centered as well as current state of the art approaches on measurement quality and invariance. Our findings suggest a meaningful but overlapping structure of liberal, social-democratic, and populist democratic values, while the comparability across cultural contexts reveals to be hampered. Further, a meaningful structure of value-holder profiles does not occur, but rather clusters of respondents who consistently seize either most or few democratic regime principles as important. We conclude with implications for democracy research and recommendations for future empirical studies on political support.