ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the breakdown of democracies in the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of totalitarianism, and the origins of the Spanish Civil War. It desires for the wealth of public opinion research that we have for a small number of countries since the late 1940s. The chapter discusses the advantages and disadvantages for the institutionalization of democracy, of presidential, semi presidential and parliamentary democracies, and of unitary and federal democracies, but on which public opinion research does not provide much information. It aims the need for such cross-national systematic and comparative studies of democracies. One of the great gaps in public opinion research is that it has been centered since the late 1940s on the limited number of old and stable democracies. The chapter examines the relationships among the belief in the capacity of democratic institutions to handle problems efficaciously, the actual performance of those institutions, and the legitimacy of those institutions.