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Rashid Tazitdinovich Mukhaev, Elena Evgenievna Prokopenko, Sergey Alexandrovich Barkov,  
 
Dmitry Nikolaevich Zemliakov y Ilya Viktorovich Okhotnikov
The impact of anti-democratic values on the deconsolidation of liberal democracy in Western  
 
Europe: an empirical analysis
the implementation of the roles and functions of institutions and increases 
the predictability of decisions based on competition-cooperation relations. 
Markers of consolidation quantication are as follows: the internalization 
of democratic norms by various groups of elites (Linz, Stepan, 1996), the 
role of civil society organizations in the political process (Paxton, 2002), 
the distribution of post-material (Inglehart, 1997) or emancipative (Welzel, 
2013) values in society, etc. 
Despite  dierent  approaches,  the  common  thing  that  unites  all  the 
authors is that the eective functioning of democratic institutions is possible 
only if there are  indispensable  conditions.  Their  suciency  excludes  the 
subsequent  erosion  of  institutions  and  the  possible  deconsolidation  of 
liberal democracies.
The hypothesis about the relationship between the deconsolidation of 
democracy and the growth of anti-democratic values requires a theoretical 
reection on the “democracy” term that has no clear denition in modern 
political science. To distinguish between democracies and non-democracies, 
we used the matrix of R. Dahl who understood it as a political regime that 
meets  two  criteria:  a)  fair,  competitive,  and  inclusive  elections;  b)  the 
observance of civil and political rights (Dahl, 2010).
R. Dahl called all the regimes that meet procedural and civil-legal criteria 
“polyarchies” or democracies. Thus, liberal democracy is a political regime, 
whose functioning is based on the fair, competitive, and inclusive elections 
of government bodies that guarantee the observance of civil and political 
rights of individuals. 
Modern  democracies  ensure  the  integration  of  society  thanks  to  the 
institutional order based on: the separation of powers and the system of 
checks  and  balances,  free  and  fair  elections,  inclusive  surage,  the  rule 
of  law,  the  freedom  of  opinion,  alternative  sources  of  information,  the 
protection  of  minority  rights,  etc.  Some  scholars  call  these  institutions 
inclusive (Acemoglu, Robinson, 2012), while the others refer to them as an 
“open access order” (North, Wallis, Weingast, 2009).
The  functioning  of  democratic  institutions  is  ensured  by  a  set  of 
dispositions  conditioned  by  values  and  cultural  norms  of  generalized 
reciprocity. Culture usually embraces the values and beliefs of various ethnic, 
religious, or social groups passed down from generation to generation in a 
relatively unchanged form (Alesina, Giuliano, 2015). 
Within the political-cultural approach, any consolidated political 
regime is the result of a balance between cultural patterns and institutional 
practices at the current moment (Almond, Verba, 1963). The divergence of 
cultural patterns and institutional practices leads to the deconsolidation of 
any regime. It is worth mentioning that deconsolidation is a process, not a 
result of certain changes within the political system.