Determinantes contextuais da coesão do sistema de crenças democrático: evidências a partir da América Latina

Abstract

This article analyzes the impact of contextual factors - GDP per capita, quality of democracy, and uninterrupted years of democracy - on the cohesion of the democratic belief system of Latin Americans. We consider a cohesive Democrat who supports different democratic principles, notably: the free and competitive elections, separation of powers, the rule of law, political participation and tolerance. We use a multilevel model with public opinion data from 19 countries of the Americas Barometer 2010. The results show that people living in countries with higher GDP per capita and stable democracies are more likely to be cohesive Democrats. The quality of democracy, in turn, did not show significant results. We argue that these findings have important implications for democracy in the region.

Keywords:
democratic legitimacy; belief system; support for democracy; democracy; quality of democracy