Democracy in South Asia: An Expanding ‘Imagination’

Democracy has become an accepted lexicon among ruling elites and the general public through the twentieth century. However, there are also doubts about its strength in the current century. Looking at survey data, this article attempts a first-cut analysis of citizens’ commitment to democracy. Taking an elected government as the primary principle of democracy, do citizens make concessions to non-elected decision-making processes? This article focuses on the five countries of South Asia to answer this question and arrives at the conclusion that there is often a large gap between a broader acceptance of democratic government as a principle and the more nuanced acceptance of democratic government as a necessary element of democracy.