As always, this book owes multiple debts to many friends and colleagues. The analysis draws upon a unique database, the World Values Survey (WVS) and the European Values Surveys (EVS); these surveys were conducted from 1981 to 2007. Enormous gratitude is owed to all the WVS and EVS participants for creating and sharing this invaluable dataset, not least to Ronald Inglehart, as well as to all the executive committee and the survey contributors. More information about the World Values Survey is available at the WVS Web site, http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org. The European surveys were gathered by the European Values Study group. For more information, see the EVS Web site, http://www.europeanvalues.nl/.

This study builds on a previous edited book, Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Governance, published by Oxford University Press in 1999. Many of the core ideas that are developed, updated, and expanded in this book first arose a decade ago with the earlier volume, and I remain indebted to all the original contributors, not least to Joseph Nye and the Visions of Governance project. Some preliminary ideas from this study were also first presented as conference papers, generating useful feedback from discussants and colleagues at various professional meetings, including the IPSA general conference in Santiago, Chile, in June 2009; the research seminar at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung, Berlin, in September 2009; the ECPR General Conference plenary roundtable in Potsdam, September 2009; the American Political Science Association (APSA) Taskforce on Democratic Indicators at the University of California, Berkeley, in October 2009; a visiting talk at the University of Sydney in January 2010; the University of Connecticut Democracy and Democratization conference in February 2010; and the APSA annual meeting in Washington, DC, in August 2010, as well as the faculty seminar at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.