The global democratization trend of recent decades has opened wide areas of the world to comparative survey research. Researchers embrace this opportunity and analyze questions that ask people around the world how strongly they desire democracy. Apparently, great majorities of almost every society express a strong desire for democracy, even where authoritarian practices persist (Klingemann 1999; Inglehart 2003).

However, the very universality of democratic desires presents a paradox. Despite these desires’ prevalence, the majority of political regimes around the world are deficient democracies, hybrid regimes, and renewed or continued versions of autocracy. Chapter 8 demonstrated this point (see also Rose 2009; Alexander & Welzel 2011; Levitsky & Way 2010). As it seems, widespread popular desires for democracy coexist easily with deficient and even absent democracy. Indeed, we have seen in Chapter 8 that knowing what percentage of a population expresses a strong desire for democracy predicts less than 30 percent of a society’s actual level of democracy.