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This paper addresses the question of how ordinary people understand democracy. Do contemporary publics display a reasonable understanding of the meaning of democracy, and what are the contents of their definitions? Do people focus on the procedural aspects of democracy-elections, democratic institutions, and processes-which are the main focus of democratization efforts. Alternatively, do they see democracy in economic or social welfare terms? We draw on a wide range of public opinion surveys that have recently been conducted to explore these questions in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Our research yields two generalizations about popular conceptions of democracy. First, most citizens of new democracies are cognitively capable of imputing meaning to democracy in their own words. Second, and most important, most of those cognitively capable citizens think of democracy in terms of the freedoms, liberties and rights that it conveys, rather than procedural and institutional conceptions of liberal democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The third wave of democracy is now in its fourth decade and while numerous studies have been conducted on Southern Europe, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and even Africa, Asia has been consistently marginalized in the literature. Asia as a region has many democratic experiences that are empirically rich with vibrant transitions, mass participation, military coups, reversals, and many other factors that make Asia important to the study of democratization. This study attempts to place Asia in the mainstream participation literature by testing the resource theory of political participation, characterized by a positive correlation between turnout and socioeconomic status, utilizing individual level data from the 2003, 2004, and 2005 Asian Barometers across several democracies in Asia. I use linear regression to test several hypotheses derived from this theory. The results have important implications for the state of Asian democracies and the success of third wave transitions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]