Popular Conceptions of the Meaning of Democracy: Democratic Understanding in Unlikely Places

Approaches 
Prior public opinion surveys have asked two types of questions, open-ended and closed-ended, to 
ascertain popular conceptions of democracy (Mattes 2006). The open-ended approach tries to 
address two specific questions. Do ordinary citizens have the capacity to understand the concept 
of democracy? If they do, how do they define it? The close-ended question, in contrast, 
structures the choices to determine what types of democratic conceptions are most and least 
popular among ordinary citizens.
3
 Both closed-ended and open-ended questions are occasionally 
asked together (Simon 1998; Fuchs and Roller 2006). 
We focus on the open-ended questions as more likely to tap what citizens spontaneously 
associate with the term democracy, and to provide a method allowing different interpretations of 
democracy across nations. For instance, the 1998 Hewlett survey directed by Roderic Ai Camp 
(2001) asked a pair of open-ended questions to compare popular conceptions of democracy in 
three Latin American countries. More recently, three regional barometers—the Afrobarometer, 
the Asian Barometer, and the Latinobarometer—asked a similar open-ended question. These 
multinational surveys similarly asked respondents to define democracy in their own words. Yet 
they were not all based on the same notion of democracy. The Hewlett survey, for example, 
treated democracy as a single dimensional concept, and allowed respondents to identify only one 
component. The three regional surveys, in contrast, treated it as a compound concept, and 
allowed respondents to name up to three components.
The 1992 and 1995 surveys conducted in Russia and the Ukraine, in contrast, allowed the 
samples of average citizens and elites to identify all the political and other values and practices 
they would associate with democracy (Miller, Hesli, and Reisinger 1997). The researchers 
counted the number of their responses to determine the public’s cognitive capacity to understand 
democracy. This analysis presumed that “citizens who have more to say about the meaning of 
democracy has more fully developed cognitions of democracy than those who say little or 
nothing to say about it” (Miller, Hesli, and Reisinger 1997: 164). The Post-communist Citizen 
Project (Barnes and Simon 1998) asked both closed and open-ended questions in their surveys of 
five Central and Eastern European countries.