ABSTRACT
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall more than two decades ago, numerous public opinion surveys have been conducted to monitor and compare how ordinary citizenries react to the democratization taking place around them. The Afrobarometer, the Americas Barometer, the Arab Barometer, the Asian Barometer, the Eurasia Barometer, the Latino Barometer, the New Europe Barometer, and the World Values Surveys have regularly conducted such polls to examine and compare the dynamics and sources of citizen support for democracy across the various regions of the world (Heath, Fisher, and Smith 2005; Mattes 2007; Shin 2007). These surveys have revealed that a large majority of the global mass publics prefers democracy to autocratic regimes. On the basis of this and other findings, an increasing number of scholars and policy-makers have recently advocated a thesis of global democratization that holds that democracy has become a universal value and is emerging as the universally preferred political system (Diamond 2008, 2013; Inglehart and Welzel 2005; Inter-Parliamentary Union 1998; Mattes 2010; Sen 1999).
