It’s political centrists who are most hostile to democracy

The New York Times has taken a drubbing in the British press (not least here on Coffee House) for its downbeat assessment of Brexit Britain. However the full page opinion piece it ran last Thursday, by political researcher David Adler, will be music to the ears of many Brexiteers, both left and right. ‘Centrists are the most hostile to democracy,’ declares the New York Times, in the headline and standfirst for Adler’s article. ‘Research shows that it’s not the far right or the far left that is the least supportive of democracy and the most supportive of authoritarianism. It’s the centre.’

The basis of this assessment is a wealth of data from the World Values Survey, a worldwide network of social scientists, with a headquarters in Vienna, who study the impact of changing attitudes on political and social life. Since 1981 they’ve been surveying hundreds of thousands of people in around a hundred countries across the globe.