Democracies have few political heroes. Even the popularity of such redoubtable wartime giants as Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle proved to be ephemeral, whereas the periods in which merely mortal political leaders have strutted and fretted their hours on the political stage to the applause of citizen audiences generally have been brief indeed. That they have both makes the task of maintaining public support for democracies difficult and is a source of their greatest strength. We began this study by arguing that citizen support for a political regime and its leaders, and for the community of which they are a part, flows from both political socialization experiences and evaluative judgments regarding the performance of political objects generally and the extent to which they provide for one's personal well-being and that of cherished others. In turn, each of these twin pillars of support has two parts: effectiveness and equityfairness assessments, in the case of political objects and processes, and group identities and democratic norms, in the case of political socialization. We noted that political socialization is one component of a more general process through which people become social beings. As a consequence there are times in the life of a democracy when the support accorded certain social objects and processes will be higher than that accorded manifestly political ones.

One reason is the sporadic and haphazard character of political socialization in democracies, a condition that also makes it extremely difficult to delineate the impact of socialization effects on political support. A second, related, reason is the content of what is being transmitted through the socialization process; the information that socializing agents provide about the political system and its leaders is not always positive or flattering to them. Still another reason is the distinction between what is public and what is private. In representative democracies, including Canada, socialization experiences work to define separate and well-demarcated public and private spheres.