Blog 4 - at long last, it works!

#4

Another Look at Canada

There has been a long standing and important debate over what causes democracy to take root in some countries, and not in others. One of the most popular is the civic culture argument, which claims that the culture of a country is the strongest indicator of whether a country will become democratic or not. This argument uses three main variables as its base: civic engagement, political equality, and solidarity.

What does these terms actually mean? Civic engagement is, put simply, how involved the average person is in voluntary social activities. This includes religious activities, social clubs, music groups, political parties, etc. Political equality is largely self-explanatory. Are all people allowed to participate in politics, or are some people not allowed to for any reason, be it race, gender, economic class, etc.? Finally, solidarity is the difficult-to-define feeling amongst the people. Does the average person feel some sort of connection with their fellow countrymen? Or are they suspicious, or afraid of them?

In order to evaluate the usefulness of the civic culture, we need an example country to evaluate using the theory's standards and then see if it correctly predicted the country's amount of democracy. In order to do so I have selected the country of Canada, which will be analyzed using the 2005-2008 survey data from the World Values Survey. We will look at the survey results for the three main variables of civic engagement, solidarity, and political equality.

Are Canadians actively engaged in civic culture? The survey results actually indicate that the majority of Canadians are not. In terms of religious affiliation, 49.5% of Canadians reported they are not a member, 22.6% reported they are affiliated but inactive, and 27.9% reported they are an active member of a religion. The same applies for sports (56.7% not a member, 14.2% inactive member, 29.1% active member) and Art and Music groups (64.2% not a member, 12.6% inactive member, 23.2% active member). And, most tellingly, this inactivity is most strongly seen in politics. Only 11.7% reported that politics was very important to them, with 27.4% reporting it is rather important, 36.6% reporting it was not very important, and 14.2% reporting it was not important at all. This is only underscored by the surprising statistic that 82.6% of Canadians report that they are not affiliated with any political party at all, with 12.3% reporting they are an inactive member, and only 5.1% reporting they are an active member of a political party. Compare this with the 8.6% that claim politics are not important at all in the United States and the 16.3% that are active members of a political party. It is clear, then, that Canadians are not particularly big on civic engagement.

What of Solidarity? Canadians were almost evenly split on whether people can be trusted in general, reporting in at 42.8% positive, and 57.2% suspicious of people in general. While, on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being people would take advantage of you and 10 being people would try to be fair, Canadians came out slightly more optimistically, reporting in at 4% with ones, 2.7%, 5.8%, and 13.5% with two through 5 (the median point between split between optimistic and cautious). On the optimistic end Canadians reported 14% with a six, 18.5%, 21%, 9.6% and 3.9% from seven to ten respectively. The extremes were rare, and the average scored between 6.5 and 7. The final solidarity question here examined touched on how Canadians viewed other Canadians. Only 7.6% said they would trust other Canadians completely, with 77.% percent reporting they would trust them a little, 13% saying they would trust Canadians not very much, and only 1.9% saying they would trust fellow Canadians not at all. Again, there is a generally favorable, though cautious, trust and association with fellow Canadians. So, we can conclude that there is a real, if not especially powerful, sense of solidarity among Canadians.

And finally, the sense of political equality. The survey asked if men had more right to a job than women had. 14.3% reported they agreed, while an overwhelming 77.9% said they did not. There was, oddly, 7.8% that said they neither agreed nor disagreed. Regardless, it is clear that the majority feel, at least theoretically, that women are equal with men in terms of capability in employment (if not superior). Our other major indicator is that there was only that single question about equality – there simply is not enough disagreement to merit more questions on the subject. We can safely say that there is a strong sense of equality in Canada.

How then does Canada stack up? Their civic engagement was low, their Solidarity was weak, but there, and their politician equality was strong. Yet Canada is a strong democracy, and has been for some time. What can we conclude? Well, there are probably more, or different, indicators for Democracy than just these. There is a good chance that civic engagement is not as important as outlined, or perhaps is not as important in the long term (as opposed to right at the beginning of the move to democracy). The same can be said for solidarity – it very well could be a factor, but the weak association could indicate that there are other stronger factors. Political equality, however, showed a strong correlation according to the theory. This, I think, is the strongest point of the theory.