Clustering Public Perceptions of Democracy and Exploring Their Relationships With Political Regimes

Abstract Classifications of democracy perceptions play an important role in political science, enabling the prediction or understanding of socio-political developments. The paper examines perceptions of democracy among citizens worldwide and scrutinizes how these perceptions interrelate with specific political regimes. To attain a comprehensive understanding of democracy perceptions, we utilized data from World Value Survey databases. The study encompassed the opinions of 113,929 respondents from 27 countries over three study waves (2005–2022). Through the k-means cluster analysis, we identified three primary perception types: (1) social liberals, (2) stabilizers, and (3) non-essentialists. We found that the social liberal perception was strongly associated with full-democratic regimes, while stabilizers and non-essentialist perceptions were more linked to flawed democracy, hybrid, and authoritarian regimes. Based on the obtained results, theoretical and methodological considerations were discussed for future public opinion studies.