This paper examines on a global scale how important it is for young democracies to deliver economic welfare to win the hearts of their citizens. A decoupling of popular support for democratic form of government from economic performance is believed to be conducive to the consolidation of young democracies. We found an encouraging global pattern that clearly shows evaluations of economic condition are relatively unimportant in explaining level of popular support for democracy. However, high-income East Asian countries register a glaring exception to this global generalization, suggesting that their distinctive trajectory of regime transition has imposed on democratic regimes an additional burden of sustaining a record of miraculous economic growth of the past.

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ResumoO artigo trata dos aspectos socioculturais das democracias latino-americanas, e mostra as dificuldades dos processos de consolidação dos vários países quanto aos problemas institucionais e políticos: a organização dos partidos, a construção da estabilidade, a solução da crise econômica. Os dados que embasam as análises são extraídos do Latinobarômetro, realizado em 8 países em 1995, e focalizam os traços comuns da cultura política na região. Palavras-chave: cultura política, partidos políticos, democratização, América Latina AbstractThe article deals with the sociocultural aspects of the Latin American democracies, and shows the difficulties of the process of political consolidation regarding political and institutional problems: the organization of parties, the political stability, the solution of economic crisis. The data are extracted from the Latinobarometro survey, conducted in 8 countries in 1995, and they focus on the common traits of the political culture of the region.

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Amid what is now recognized as a years-long democratic recession that includes not only backslidings in younger democracies but dysfunctions in established ones, it is important to see the phenomenon not only through the lenses of experts at Freedom House or V-Dem, but from the standpoint of ordinary citizens. It is they, after all, who should have the final say over what kind of democratic political system they are experiencing and whether its quality of governance lives up to their expectations. Support for and satisfaction with democracy may come from many sources including the provision of political goods, economic success, protection of human safety, and improvement in governance (in terms of transparency, fairness, impartiality, and the like). Such tangible benefits deeply affect citizens' commitment to democracy. 1 Experts make their assessments of how democracy is doing in this country and ordinary citizens make theirs. What citizens experience may accord with what the experts see, or it may not. By offering a citizen-based perspective, we are not dismissing the experts, but we do hope to enrich the overall picture of the current state of democracy around the world.Using the longitudinal data accrued from the Global Barometer Surveys (GBS), 2 we can track changes in popular orientation toward democracy in 51 countries across three continents