ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Comparative Governance
This article is part of the Research TopicResearching Political Legitimacy: Concepts, Theories, Methods and Empirical StudiesView all 10 articles
Measurement of Democratic Values: A Cross-country Comparison with ESS round 10
Provisionally accepted
- 1GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany
- 2German Center for Gerontology (DZA), Berlin, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
- 3University of Giessen, Giessen, Germany
- 4University of Marburg, Marburg, Hesse, Germany
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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.
Keywords: Political support, Democratic Legitimacy and Legitimation, Democratic values, Measurement invariance (MI), cross-cultural research, factor analysis, latent profile analysis, ESS round 10
Received: 15 Apr 2025; Accepted: 03 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kolkwitz-Anstötz, Platt, Schmidt and Heyder. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Pascal Kolkwitz-Anstötz, pascal.kolkwitz-anstoetz@gesis.org
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