Mass subjectivity and the democratic competence of nations

As argued in Chapter 1, citizens and publics inhabit ‘a political environment where they are continually encouraged by various actors to vocalize their views’ (Stanyer, 2007, p. 157). Some of the ‘actors’ to which Stanyer refers are academic psychologists, experts in public opinion polling who are interested in the aggregate description and distribution of the various dimensions of social and political behaviour: attitudes, motives, preferences, wishes, value orientations, and so on. Value orientations are perhaps the most important to understanding issues around political attitudes, social and political change, and political participation (Inglehart, 2009).

This chapter sketches the various attempts at describing the universal psychological structure of human values and the implications of such attempts for understanding democracy promotion and democratisation. It explores the tension between aggregate and universalistic models and contingent, contextual, particularistic manifestations of political behaviour. By focusing on the issue of questioning democracy promotion, this chapter shows how value orientations cannot be satisfactorily conceptualised outside an inter-subjective framework and ordinary ways of reasoning about values. The promotion of ‘formal democracy’ cannot work outside the framework of mass values offered by the existing socio-political context. The chapter ends by arguing that values should be treated as ideologically and culturally situated argumentative resources, and that researchers should emphasise not only their universalistic, but also their particularistic features, especially the fragmentary, multiple and unfinished nature of value searches, value expressions and value orientations.