Intrinsic or Instrumental Support for Democracy in a Post-Communist Society. the Case of Serbia1

1. IntroductionDuring the third wave of democratization (Huntington, 1991), the majority of former communist countries underwent the process of transition towards the multiparty political system and free market, i.e. democracy. One of the most important tasks of the newly established democratic regimes was to propagate and develop citizens' allegiance to democratic norms and values. However, the possibility of the development of pro-democratic political culture in a previously non-democratic society has been a very important theoretical and empirical question for decades and caused several disagreements between scholars.According to the proponents of the culturalist model (Almond & Verba, 1989; Eckstein, 1988; Inglehart & Welzel, 2005), democratic political structure is rooted in culture and has cultural preconditions. Citizens accept only those political and economic structures which are compatible with their relatively stable cultural orientations and political values. Being a product of the common (early) socialization, they can only be changed during the socialization process, under the influence of more general structural factors such as economic modernization, urbanization etc. (Almond & Verba, 1989; Eckstein, 1988; Huntington, 1991; Lipset, 1959; Inglehart & Welzel, 2005). The prevailing political culture changes only slowly and in the long term, so it takes a long time for a democracy to consolidate in a previously non-democratic country (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005; Klingemann et al., 2006). Although the citizens of post-communist countries, compared to those of Western societies, are generally less supportive of democracy (Klingeman et al., 2006; Pavlovic, 2007), the democratization of ex- communist countries, despite prolonged systematic indoctrination, was accompanied by a high level of general support for democracy (Gibson, 1996; Klingemann et al., 2006; Mishler & Rose, 2002; Pavlovic, 2007; Rose & Mishler, 1994). However, the proponents of the culturalist model argue that this "enthusiasm" for democracy cannot be taken for granted. Citizens of the former communist countries support democracy mainly (or only) because of the goals that developed democracies have achieved and as an instrument for their accomplishment. The standards for such evaluation are external, more prominent and less important manifestations of Western democracies' performances (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005; Welzel & Inglehart, 2009). Because of the prolonged authoritarian rule and the lack of democratic (political) tradition, the support for democracy is rather a manifestation of the desirability of its effects (in terms of economic performances) than an expression of the acceptance of democratic norms and procedures, rights and freedoms that define its essence. In other words, it is nothing but an instrumental support, a mere lip service to democracy, a phenomenon similar to which Dalton (1994, p. 479) calls Fragebogendemokraten. Consequently, it speaks nothing of pro-democratic features of the prevailing political culture.The argument that the necessary condition for the consolidation of democracy in a former communist country is the shift in political culture (Klingemann et al., 2006) is strongly supported by some empirical data. Inglehart, for example, has repeatedly argued that self-expression values (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005) or, more recently, emancipative values (Welzel & Inglehart, 2009) are an essence of the democratic political culture. Aggregate (country level) measures of self-expression values are highly correlated with Freedom House scores and with some other composite indexes of democracy 's effectiveness (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005), implying that the higher the mass acceptance of self-expression values, the more effective the country's democracy, as well as the relevance of mass attitudes for the type and the quality of political system. Inglehart even argues that it is highly probable that democracy will emerge in a society where 45% of population embrace self-expression values (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005). …