Institutional Support and Democratic Values: Developing Indicators for a Global Democracy Index

The goal of the workshop, according to the invitation, is to develop a set of cross nationally valid questionnaire items that can be used to measure individual attitudes that are supportive of a politically democratic form of governance. The invitation also stipulates that the new measure is rights-based, centered on a set of beliefs that support the basic principle of majority rule and minority rights\u85 and encourages efforts to get at underlying attitudes that distinguish those who would support a democratic form of government from those who would not. In light of these objectives, I will focus this essay on what Easton (1965) calls the regime. I will not consider attitudes about the communityi.e., individual-level attitudes about those criteria that define membership in a nation-state (Almond and Verba 1963). Neither will I consider different conceptions of democracies.1 As a starting point, I suggest that we systematically distinguish between (1) citizens attitudes towards institutions; and (2) citizens attitudes about democratic values. Attitudes about institutions express summary judgments about whether a given regime meets citizens expectations (more of this below). Attitudes about democrati