The dramatic expansion of democratic regimes throughout the world has produced a boom inthe field of survey research. There are at least six reasons for this boom. First, democracybrings with it elections, and with elections, parties and candidates who want to know whereand 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 theirreelection depend upon the public will, but their ability to govern depends to a greatdegree 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 beable to gauge their impacts once implemented. Fourth, international donors increasinglycarry out surveys of “users” or potential users of public services to help them plan theirinvestment strategies. Fifth, international donors regularly examineprogram impacts as a means of evaluating project success and as a means of targeting futuregrants and loans. Finally, within the field of political science at least, there is agrowing consensus that political culture matters for sustaining democracy and that theentire “democracy game” goes beyond finding the right institutions to having citizensbelieve in democratic principles. There is, of course, no unanimity on this point, raised soforcefully years ago in Dahl's “Preface to Democratic Theory,” and there will be those amongthe “new institutionalists” who entirely dismiss the role of what Dahl called the “consensuson the polyarchal norms” (1956, 135). Yet, broadly speaking, it is fair to say that mostdemocracy 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 democraticconsolidation is to risk missing an important part of the story.