ABSTRACT
The eminent political theorist Robert Dahl asserted that “a key characteristic of democracy is the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals.”1 This formulation implies first that citizens must have meaningful preferences for democratic government to be possible, and second that in order to gauge the democratic quality of any given government we must be able both to discern what its citizens’ preferences are, and to assess how strongly and how equally government policy responds to those preferences.
