Varying Understandings of Democracy in the Contemporary World

Abstract

This chapter presents systematic descriptive evidence on the status of popular conceptions of democracy in today’s world, using GBS II data from seventy-one societies. To make the descriptive analysis more informative, we have included comparable information from the United States and relied on different psychometric models to uncover people’s latent characteristics that shape their responses to the PUD instruments. We have consistently found that the PUD instruments are sufficiently sensitive to the socioeconomic and political environment, thus revealing significant and substantial variation in popular conceptions of democracies across regions, between societies, and among individuals. To ensure that the variation documented in the PUD instruments is not something transient or idiosyncratic, we further explore the longitudinal dynamics of this critical attitude using the ABS two-wave rolling-cross-sectional surveys from thirteen East Asian societies.