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<jats:p>The dramatic expansion of democratic regimes throughout the world has produced a boom in
the field of survey research. There are at least six reasons for this boom. First, democracy
brings with it elections, and with elections, parties and candidates who want to know where
and how to campaign and contributors who want to know on which “horse” to place their bets.
Second, democratic governments care very much about public opinion since not only does their
reelection depend upon the public will, but their ability to govern depends to a great
degree on how well they are able to gauge public reaction to their policies. Third,
democratic governments want objective information to help them plan their programs and to be
able to gauge their impacts once implemented. Fourth, international donors increasingly
carry out surveys of “users” or potential users of public services to help them plan their
investment strategies. Fifth, international donors regularly examine
program impacts as a means of evaluating project success and as a means of targeting future
grants and loans. Finally, within the field of political science at least, there is a
growing consensus that political culture matters for sustaining democracy and that the
entire “democracy game” goes beyond finding the right institutions to having citizens
believe in democratic principles. There is, of course, no unanimity on this point, raised so
forcefully years ago in Dahl's “Preface to Democratic Theory,” and there will be those among
the “new institutionalists” who entirely dismiss the role of what Dahl called the “consensus
on the polyarchal norms” (1956, 135). Yet, broadly speaking, it is fair to say that most
democracy experts would agree that in democracies, the public matters; publics vote,
protest, and even rebel, and to exclude them in the calculus of the study of democratic
consolidation is to risk missing an important part of the story.</jats:p>