Democracy without Democratic Values: A Rejoinder to Welzel and Inglehart
In reply to Welzel and Inglehart in this issue, we deploy three lines of criticism. First, we argue that their newly invented construct "effective democracy" is conceptually and empirically flawed. Second, we show that their results are highly sensitive to model specification. Regardless of the time period, their supportive evidence vanishes if a more pertinent measure of democracy is used instead