Constructive and destructive aspects of heterogeneity in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Recent episodes of public dissent have staked their claim to a profound focus on the meaning of disobedience within democratic systems, raising relevant questions concerning the psychological processes set off in obeying and disobeying the authority, and on the role that disobedience has in the relationship between individuals and society. Are acts of disobedience a form of non-institutionalized political action or some form of social deviance? What is the difference between pro-democratic disobedience and the disobedience that does not lead to democracy? Dahl’s political theory suggests that democratic ideals and values are fundamental for procedural and institutional democracy. The aim of this research was to consider the relationship between the ideological dimension of democracy and the meanings attributed to obedience and disobedience. We stress the differences between the dimensions of obedience and disobedience, distinguishing at least between responsible obedience and blind obedience and between pro-social disobedience and anti-social disobedience. Three studies were conducted on the World Values Survey data: Study 1 verifies the hypothesis of complementarity according to which obedience and disobedience represent complementary aspects of the support for democratic values; Study 2 verifies the hypothesis of prosociality of disobedience underlining under which psychological condition disobedience can be considered as prosocial and prodemocratic; Study 3 investigates the hypothesis of causality, according to which individual attitudes towards disobedience are predictive of the level of democracy at institutional level.