Democracy's Meanings: How the Public Understands Democracy and Why It MattersDemocracy’s Meanings challenges conventional wisdom regarding how the public thinks about and evaluates democracy. Mining both political theory and more than 75 years of public opinion data, the book argues that Americans think about democracy in ways that go beyond voting or elected representation. Instead, citizens have rich and substantive views about the material conditions that democracy should produce, which draw from their beliefs about equality, fairness, and justice. |
Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction | 1 |
Chapter 2 What Is Democracy? Definitions and Scholarly Disagreements | 15 |
Chapter 3 Polling the Public about Democracy | 30 |
Chapter 4 Creating and Validating a Typology of Democratic Meanings | 51 |
Chapter 5 The Correlates of the Democracy Typology | 68 |
Chapter 6 Compromise and Representation within the Democracy Typology | 90 |
Chapter 7 Support for Democracy | 112 |