Assembling the Empirical Evidence
It is not our goal to review the rival hypotheses on why public support for democratic politics may be eroding (see
Klingemann and Fuchs 1995; Nye et al. 1997). The general features of these theories, however, have implications for
the types of empirical evidence that should be collected. Thus, we want briefly to discuss these theoretical explanations
in the context of our data collection needs.