Democratic Competence: Attitudes 2

In my previous post, I found out what an “attitude” is and which attitudes are essential to have in a democracy. Attitudes are made up of the four components belief, emotion, evaluation and behaviour and it seems that it all starts with belief. I must admit I was a little surprised that democracy seems to have more in common with “faith” than with politics…The European Council (EC) names six attitudes that are essential for people to adopt in a democracy.

However, how do I actually “perform” these attitudes or what do they involve? Therefore, I have created tables in this post where I list those qualities that I need to have, according to the EC, and I copied the performance characteristics of these attitudes, so I don’t get lost. I might be mistaken, but it seems one needs a lot of “soft skills” and rather “fuzzy” qualities to perform democratic attitudes: Willingness to, Recognition of, Sensitivity towards, Curiosity about, Positive regard for, Belief in, Feeling of, Commitment to, Acceptance of, sense of accountability to etc.

In a sense, democracy seems to be an “attitude towards life” in itself. Watching the U.S. I can’t help but wonder this: either, democracy is an imagined ideal human condition that doesn’t come naturally to the human species (i.e. civic education is a MUST), or something on the planet has gone astray that more and more people are no longer willing or able to perform these attitudes.