Cultural liberalism in Eastern and Western Europe: a societal antidote to democratic backsliding?

While all European democracies have been subject to the ‘stress test’ of the global rise of illiberal populism, institutional erosion has occurred mainly in the East. Several qualitative analyses have claimed that the weakness of liberalism explains democratic vulnerability in the region. Seeking inspiration and quantitative data, we turn to the research field of global support for democracy, which has always started from the assumption that it is through cultural change rather than institutional reform that democracy takes root. By melding empirical strategies from this field with insights from democratic theory, we present a new and more exacting measure of cultural liberalism. We extract individual-level data from the European Social Survey to measure the effect of the ‘Proportion of Cultural Liberals’ (PCL) within national cohorts on levels of (de)democratization between and within East and West Europe 2012–2021. We find that PCL is positively correlated with increasing democracy levels (and resistance to democratic backsliding) across Europe. More significantly, this relationship holds independently for both Eastern and Western Europe, with the PCL effect being stronger in the East.