How Global Citizenries Think about Democracy: An Evaluation and Synthesis of Recent Public Opinion Research

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, individual scholars and research institutes have conducted numerous public opinion surveys to monitor how global citizenries react to the process of democratization taking place in their own countries and elsewhere. This article reviews the various issues surrounding the divergent conceptions of democracy among political scientists and ordinary citizens, and synthesizes significant findings of the conceptual and empirical research based on these surveys. It also raises a set of new questions that future surveys should address to broaden and deepen our knowledge about citizen conceptions of democracy.