How to Grasp the Key Democratic Transformations

This chapter provides the theoretical framework for the following comparative analysis. For the two democratic values, equality and freedom, the author proposes the justification, definition, specific subdimensions, and the main empirical questions to be addressed in the subsequent chapters. This also allows giving the necessary references to the literature on the two topics and has helped to provide the theoretical framework and develop the empirical analysis. To translate the two notions into empirically detectable concepts, equality and freedom were broken out into more dimensions. For equality, they are economic equality, social equality, ethnic equality. For freedom, they are personal dignity, civil rights, and political rights. The research design and the background approach are also briefly sketched.