ATTITUDES TOWARDS DEMOCRACY IN BULGARIA: THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY
Vol.5, Issue 2, 2019, pp.323-349 Full text
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.19.2.8
Web of Science: 000512305100010
Author:
Zhivko Minkov https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5417-6528
Affiliation: New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria
Abstract
This research is an attempt to examine the developmental relationship between democracy and the socioeconomic conditions in Bulgaria. The assumption is that one of the factors contributing to the negative attitude towards democracy in Bulgaria is the high level of social inequality. After discussing the relevance of studying democracy and socioeconomic conditions from a developmental perspective, the paper traces the socioeconomic development of Bulgaria from 1989 to date and examines public perceptions of social inequality in the country. The research has not revealed any overall negative public attitude towards democracy in Bulgaria. However, the findings have demonstrated a clear tendency for the public support for democracy to decline reflecting the growth of social inequality.
Keywords: democracy, attitude, Bulgaria, socioeconomic conditions, inequality, poverty
Article history:
Submitted: 17 September 2019;
Reviewed: 18 November 2019;
Revised: 4 December 2019;
Accepted: 20 December 2019;
Published: 30 December 2019
Citation (APA):
Minkov, Z. (2019). Attitudes towards Democracy in Bulgaria: The Importance of Social Inequalities. English Studies at NBU, 5(2), 323-349. https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.19.2.8
Copyright © 2019 Zhivko Minkov
This open access article is published and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. If you want to use the work commercially, you must first get the authors' permission.
Funding:
The research is based partly on the information from several representative polls, conducted by the sociological agencies Mediana and Sova-Harris for the period 2010–2014. The polls were ordered from the Project: "Quality of democracy in Bulgaria: democratic consent and civil participation" carried out by the department of Political Sciences at New Bulgarian University and financed by the National Science Fund (NSF) of the Ministry of Education and Science, Bulgaria, Grant number: ДТК 02/17/16.12.2009
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