Abstract:

Two of the world's leading democracy watchers have adopted different approaches to explore whether democracy delivers what it is supposed to deliver. The Freedom House approaches this problem by looking at two objective criteria: Political Rights in a country and the prevailing Civil Culture, while WIN/Gallup International uses a subjective criteria; it approaches nationally representative samples of citizens to find out whether they feel they are being ruled by the will of the people. There is a wide gap between the scores from these two approaches, and our paper is designed to investigate: Why?