POLITICAL CULTURE: THE FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF DEMOCRACY

Abstract

The measurement of democracy is something increasingly carried out both by the application of indices resulting from the evaluation of experts and by the application of political culture surveys that seek to verify how the population evaluates the democracy of their country. However, these evaluations are not always coherent, especially due to the more pessimistic view of the population. In addition to the evaluation of democracy, the existence of a democratic political culture implies the stabilization of democratic rules by countries. But what does the population understand by democracy, and what is the possibility of building a democratic political culture when it does not exist in a country or region? To answer these questions, three objectives were established: to verify whether there is coherence in the evaluation of democracy among experts and the population; what the population understands as fundamental elements of democracy; and whether the teaching of history is a way of building a democratic political culture. To achieve these objectives, data from the seventh round of the World Values Survey (WVS), the V-Dem democracy index and official Brazilian documents on the national common curricular bases, especially for the teaching of history, were compiled. The central hypothesis is that there is divergence in the evaluations between experts and the population, that the majority of the population correctly understands the fundamental elements of democracy, and that the teaching of history in Brazil is one of the few opportunities for the creation of a democratic political culture from school. The data analyzed confirm the hypothesis, although more research with this intertwining should be verified: on democracy, on the teaching of history and on democratic political culture.