Fundamentalism and Democracy: A Dynamic Perspective

Abstract

We analyse the dynamics of the distribution of democratic values in a population where agents have heterogeneous preferences about democracy, distinguishing between fundamentalist-antidemocratic agents and pro-democracy agents. Cultural traits and norms are acquired through a process of intergenerational cultural transmission and socialization. The driving force in the equilibrium selection process is the education effort exerted by parents; this depends on the distribution of democratic values in the population and on expectations about future policies affecting formal and informal institutions. The main result is that when fundamentalism is sufficiently diffused in all institutional dimensions of social life, the imposition of formal democratic rules do not significantly affect social preferences. On the other hand the model shows how a cruel fundamentalist dictatorship cannot wholly destroy democratic preferences in the population; the sole result is a fictitious homologation of manifested attitudes, with no preferences dynamics and the previous real attitudes immediately emerging as soon as dictatorship falls.