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Kolczynska Dissertation 2017.pdf (818.1 KB)

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Strati ed modernity, protest, and democracy in cross-national perspective

Kolczynska, Marta Joanna
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1508951439628422

Abstract Details

2017, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Sociology.
The goal of this dissertation is to analyze the links between democratic values, political trust, and protest participation, and the consequences of educational stratification of values, attitudes, and participation for democratization. I highlight in particular the concept of \textit{stratified modernity}, which refers to the differences in the adoption of modern values across social strata. Modernity is stratified because of the differential exposure to education systems, which are a medium of spreading modern values and orientations, as well as expectations regarding legitimate political rule, across the globe. By emphasizing the role of education in shaping within-country distributions of values, and pointing to the consequences of the social stratification of protest participation, this dissertation provides new insight into the mechanisms through which modernization improves chances for democratization. In the first empirical chapter (Chapter 4), I examine determinants of democratic values and political trust. Together these analyses test the stratified modernity thesis. I find that education is positively associated with democratic values regardless of the level of democracy of the country, and that political trust reflects the level of congruence between individual democratic values and the values represented by the political regime. In democratic countries, more educated individuals tend to have more political trust than less educated individuals, and the opposite is true for non-democracies. The second empirical chapter (Chapter 5) focuses on participation in demonstrations, and finds that participation rates tend to be highest in countries with high levels of political trust and high quality of democracy, and low political trust combined with low levels of democracy, pointing to the differential effects of political trust on demonstration rates across regimes types. Further, I find that individuals with low levels of political trust are more likely to participate in mass protest, which confirms prior findings on this topic. In the final analysis (Chapter 6), I explore how the stratification of protest participation influences democratization. According to the stratified modernity thesis, the more highly-educated strata of societies are more likely to hold democratic values and orientations, hence their participation could be expected to be more consequential for democratization. I find that the relative domination of highly educated people among protesters increases chances for improvements in the country’s quality of democracy. These results support prior findings about the importance of individual value orientations for democratization. This dissertation relies on secondary analyses of survey data. I use a subset of the Survey Data Recycling dataset stemming from \textit{ex post} harmonization of 14 cross-national survey projects, combined with country-level indicators of the quality of democracy and economic development, as well as methodological quality control variables. Modeled as a multi-level structure, with either individuals or country-years as the unit of analysis, this dataset allows me to test the consecutive stages of the hypothesized mechanism while overcoming some of the major weaknesses of prior cross-national large-N empirical studies relating values and attitudes to democratization, primarily related to limited variation of democratic quality within the country sample and lack of consideration to intra-societal processes when explaining macro outcomes.
Kazimierz Slomczynski (Advisor)
Craig Jenkins (Advisor)
Vincent Roscigno (Committee Member)
Edward Crenshaw (Committee Member)
182 p.
Sociology
democratization, political trust, protest, modernization, cross-national research, survey data harmonization, multilevel modeling

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Kolczynska, M. J. (2017). Strati ed modernity, protest, and democracy in cross-national perspective [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1508951439628422

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Kolczynska, Marta. Strati ed modernity, protest, and democracy in cross-national perspective. 2017. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1508951439628422.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Kolczynska, Marta. "Strati ed modernity, protest, and democracy in cross-national perspective." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1508951439628422

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1508951439628422
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© 2017, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Strati ed modernity, protest, and democracy in cross-national perspective by Marta Joanna Kolczynska is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.