Impacts of Rural-Urban Cleavages and Cultural Orientations on Attitudes toward Elements of Democracy: A Cross-National, Within Nation Analysis

This paper follows the lead in substituting variable names for national social systems from the project on “Democratization and Value Change in East Asia.” Specifically, it investigates the association between urbanism and adherence to democracy across nations in a merged data set. The findings hint that variations among nations in support for democracy are often more a function of urban-rural cleavages that transcend national boundaries and of similarities in these respective cultures associated with this cleavage, regardless of country, than they are of peculiarities of national cultures or other social or economic configurations represented as geographic entities.