Prognoses about the health of representative democracies have changed markedly during the twentieth century. During the 1930s and again in the 1970s and early 1980s the democracies seeming inability to cope with economic distress engendered by unemployment, sluggish growth, soaring national debt and, in the latter period, stagflation and an inability to pay for costly social programs made their future appear problematic. In several cases, additional threats were posed by apparently irreconcilable differences based on various combinations of class, ethnolinguistic, racial, religious, and regional cleavages in their populations. For some observers these compounded difficulties signaled the onset of a generalized “legitimacy crisis” to which democracies, in varying degrees, were in danger of succumbing.

At other times optimistic appraisals were the norm. The virtues of democracies were widely proclaimed after their victories in two world wars and throughout the period of protracted economic prosperity that followed the second of these conflicts. The revitalization of the economies of many Western countries in the mid-1980s, the collapse of Communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe at the end of the decade and in the Soviet Union itself in the summer of 1991 made earlier predictions of the imminent demise of democracies appear both short-sighted and invalid. They seemed based on unwarranted interpretations of public discontent produced by short-term social and economic dislocations. The discontent was real, but it was focused on governing political parties and their leaders. A more general legitimacy crisis existed only in the minds of disaffected right and left-wing intellectuals. Among ordinary citizens support for representative democracy remained strong and stable.

In our view, both types of forecasts have been too easily rendered, because despite the vast literature on public attitudes and behavior, much remains to be learned about support for democratic political systems, their components, and the factors that influence them. Also, surprisingly little research exists on how variations in support affect crucial attitudes, such as the willingness of people to voluntarily comply with the edicts of duly constituted authorities, or their periodic proclivity to engage in confrontation al protests. Our study addresses such questions through a case study of political support in Canada, one of the world's oldest, continuously functioning democracies, but one which also has experienced support problems that have occasionally reached crisis proportions.