There is growing interest among social scientists in the local meanings that people around the world attach to “democracy” and its rough equivalents in other languages. We want to know whether democracy, when transported or translated, means what we think it does. Posing this question promises to furnish insight into the political worldviews of the people we want to understand. The question also invites us to reflect on what it means to ask a host of affiliated questions, such as “Are people satisfied with democracy?” or “Does popular support for democracy vary from one country to another?”

While a small number of studies on local understandings have used interpretive or ethnographic tools,Footnote 1 most work on this topic has relied on survey research.Footnote 2 This article draws attention to problems with the most sophisticated variant of the latter approach, a variant that uses a combination of open-ended and follow-up questioning. I undertake this critique by comparing the findings of a 2002 Philippine survey that uses this sophisticated approach with the results of my own 2001 fieldwork in one Philippine community, where I also investigated how people understand democracy—or more accurately, the Tagalog word demokrasya—using interpretive rather than survey-research tools.Footnote 3

My substantive findings are obviously limited to one small place. I do not claim that they are representative of the Philippines in general. The goal of this article is not to demonstrate that my particular findings hold for people throughout that country or beyond. Rather, the aim is to put under the microscope the use of a widely used survey question as a tool for inquiring about understandings of democracy. I hope to show how misleading conclusions result from the ways that data gathered by means of this question have been recorded, coded, and interpreted. To the extent that the difficulties I identify are generic to a common set of research practices, my case study raises larger questions about what we should make of survey results on meanings of democracy that are generated by the same set of practices in other parts of the world. The particulars may be specific to one locale, but the generic methodological problems they illuminate are potentially far-reaching.

This critique is not only about methods. Its implications are deeply political insofar as the products of this survey research are disseminated widely. Most of the research has been conducted within the framework of the now far-ranging Global Barometer Project, a worldwide network of survey researchers who study public attitudes toward democracy. This project and its use of the open-ended question have so far produced numerous papers, articles, and book chapters,Footnote 4 as well as three high-profile booksFootnote 5 on how people understand democracy around the world. The International Political Science Association judged the Global Barometer survey data on this question to be important enough to devote its President’s Plenary Session at the 2012 World Congress to analyses of it. Furthermore, a stated objective of the Global Barometer Project is to direct its reports

to a wide assortment of users, including decision makers in legislative and executive branches of government, policy advocates and civic educators, journalists in the mass media, and researchers doing program evaluations of programs of good governance and socioeconomic development.Footnote 6

To publicize their findings, Global Barometer researchers have, among other things, held press conferences, published stories in news magazines, and made presentations to government officials. To the extent that Global Barometer survey results shape public policies, their misleading quality is not a matter of mere academic concern; it has immediate political relevance.

The 2002 Philippine survey I examine was conducted as part of the Global Barometer Project. This project represents not only the most wide-ranging attempt to access local understandings of democracy through survey research, its open-ended questioning is also the most refined effort to do so. The main survey-research alternative is to present interviewees with a menu of pre-determined definitions from which to choose. By channeling responses in directions already selected by the researcher, this format circumscribes severely the range of understandings that can be tapped. The Global Barometer’s open-ended question was designed to eliminate this problem. The question, rendered in English, takes the rough form of “What for you is the meaning of the word ‘democracy?’ ” A follow-up question – “What else?”—is then posed and repeated, yielding up to three answers. This open-ended format requires interviewees to define democracy “in their own words,” thereby providing—the promise is—a picture of what they understand the term to mean that is not colored by the preconceptions of the researcher.Footnote 7 Questions using this format, with minor variations, have been posed in at least 49 countries.Footnote 8

In the most ambitious attempt to aggregate and make sense of the data obtained by means of open-ended questioning, Russell Dalton, Doh Shin, and Willy Jou reach the following conclusion about how democracy is understood around the world:

Strikingly, democracy is broadly identified in terms of freedom and civil liberties. In most nations, these democratic outcomes are what most people think of when they define democracy. Definitions referencing elections, majority rule, and other such democratic procedures and institutions are only about half as frequent as those citing freedom and liberty. People seem to understand that electoral and constitutional democracy is not sufficient. To most people, the real meaning of democracy is in what it produces …. Relatively few people define democracy in terms of social benefits (only about a tenth of respondents do so) …. These results undercut claims that supporters of democracy really mean they want higher living standards and similar benefits.Footnote 9

The authors go on to write that we cannot “assum[e] that democracy is a Western concept, understood only by the affluent and well-educated citizens in established, advanced industrial democracies” since “a large proportion of the public in developing nations defines democracy in liberal-democratic terms.”Footnote 10 More to the point, they claim that people around the world are “surprisingly consistent” in how they think about democracy.Footnote 11 Among the implications of this finding: scholars can go ahead and meaningfully ask a question like “Why does popular support for democracy vary from one country to another?”—as for instance Yun-han Chu et al. do—because public-opinion survey questions on “support for democracy” measure the same thing cross-nationally.Footnote 12 This finding is also welcome news to those invested in exporting liberal democracy, for it shows that many people around the world share the same basic liberal worldview.

Michael Bratton also looks at the big picture, but offers a more tentative analysis. He notes how coverage of the Global Barometer surveys with regard to the open-ended democracy question is not truly global (missing for instance is the Middle East) and how results vary depending on how data are weighed. He nevertheless reaches the same conclusion about the centrality of civil liberties and adds that “this common pattern of shared meaning across all world regions offers a prima facie justification for proceeding, at least cautiously, with comparative analysis of other survey questions that employ the word ‘democracy.’ ”Footnote 13

Data from the 2002 Global Barometer survey conducted in the Philippines seem to be consistent with the findings of Bratton and Dalton, Shin, and Jou. The Philippine project coordinator, Linda Guerrero, and a co-author reported that “nearly half [of the respondents] associated democracy with freedom and liberty.”Footnote 14 Guerrero and another co-author put the results of the 2002 survey in the context of other surveys conducted in the Philippines. They concluded that the “first and highest meaning [of democracy]” is “political freedom, civil liberties.”Footnote 15

How People in Barangay Commonwealth Speak of Demokrasya, a First Cut

To study local understandings of demokrasya, I and two research assistants conducted 139 ordinary language interviews in 2001. We interviewed people living in an urban community called Barangay Commonwealth, which is located in Quezon City, the largest city in the Philippines and a part of Metro Manila.Footnote 16 Commonwealth is the largest barangay (the smallest unit of local administration) in Quezon City and has a population of about 120,000. The residents of Commonwealth are predominantly poor and demographically resemble people in the many other poor communities of Metro Manila. We conducted all interviews in Tagalog—the most widely spoken language in the country—or at the interviewees’ prompting, Taglish, a mixture of Tagalog and English commonly spoken in that part of the country.

Ordinary language interviewing is a shorthand label that I use to describe the self-conscious application of interviewing strategies inspired by ordinary language philosophy, as pioneered by John Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This form of interviewing is an interpretive tool for uncovering the meaning of words in everyday talk. One looks at language in use by engaging the interviewee in a conversation and, within that conversation, providing the person with occasions to use particular words of interest in ways that reveal their various meanings. While the interview is open-ended and conversational, it is nevertheless structured to the extent that it is designed to expose the meanings of words through deliberate questioning strategies. Among these strategies are judgment questions that require the interviewee to express opinions that lay bare the standards implicit in a term; example prompts that invite the interviewee to recall or imagine concrete instantiations of a term; and internal-logic questions that provide the interviewee an opportunity to reflect on how various ways he or she is using a term might be connected.Footnote 17 One advantage of these interviewing strategies is that they elicit richly detailed responses. To provide a sense of that richness, I share in the course of this article a handful of interview excerpts.

On the surface, the results of our ordinary language interviewing seem to support the conclusions of the 2002 Philippine survey—that people think of demokrasya largely in terms of freedom in general and civil liberties in particular. When we asked Commonwealth residents what demokrasya means, and related questions, 76 percent of those who offered substantive answers articulated understandings of demokrasya that seemed to involve something like freedom or civil liberties.Footnote 18 Within this group, 81 percent included somewhere in their answers the word kalayaan or its adjectival form malaya, which might be translated to mean “freedom” and “free,” respectively (I preserve the original Tagalog because we will return to the meaning of these words later).

There are several types of kalayaan that people in Commonwealth identified as being part of demokrasya. Among the most commonly named were the freedoms of movement, speech, and religion, as well as the freedom to start a business, choose political leaders, or make choices about one’s lifestyle. Typical were the following statements:

Rag seller: “If there is demokrasya … people have kalayaan to say whatever they want, to do what they want, to vote for whom they want.”

Carpenter: “When there is demokrasya, people are malaya to do anything they want …. Men can go out drinking with their friends whenever they feel like it.”

Unemployed woman: “Demokrasya is the kalayaan of people to live in a community and not be suppressed by the people in government. For example, you are malaya to live, work, express yourself, to serve and worship God.”

If analysis were to end here, it would seem that to many people in Commonwealth, demokrasya—by way of kalayaan—does mean something like “civil liberties,” if we understand civil liberties to include things like freedom of speech and religion as well as personal autonomy. One might thus conclude that the equation of kalayaan and demokrasya with civil liberties is justified.

Three Problems

An uncomplicated and unambiguous equation of demokrasya or kalayaan with civil liberties would, nevertheless, be misleading, at least for the people we interviewed in Commonwealth. To understand why, it is necessary to take note of three methodological problems—compression, compartmentalization, and homogenization—that attended the 2002 survey. (The first two problems are also evident in my intentionally compressed and compartmentalized presentation above of my own fieldwork results.) Global Barometer surveys conducted elsewhere in the world, not incidentally, exhibit the same three problems. These problems make the 2002 Philippine survey question in particular, and the Global Barometer survey question in general, less open-ended than they might seem. Recall that it is open-endedness that promised to make the Global Barometer question so revealing. But the claim that people had their views captured “in their own words” is less accurate than might at first appear.

Compression

In both the 2002 Philippine survey and the Global Barometer surveys more generally, the question about how people understand democracy (or its rough equivalents in other languages) is only one of many questions posed. The Philippine survey included 143 other questions on topics ranging from electoral participation to trust in institutions to evaluations of current economic conditions. Interviewers did not have the opportunity to invite long responses, nor were they encouraged to. The survey form included a total of only three blank lines to record everything the interviewee had to say to the initial open-ended “What for you is the meaning of the word ‘democracy’?” question and the two follow-up “What else?” prompts. The recorded responses to the initial question, from the 881 people who gave any answer at all,Footnote 19 ranged from a single word to a few clipped phrases. Typical answers were kalayaan, may kalayaan na gumawa/kumilos ng lahat ng gusto mo (having kalayaan to do anything you want/act in any way you want), and kalayaan makapagpahayag ng sariling pananaw/sariling opinyon (kalayaan to express one’s own viewpoint/opinion).

One can only wonder about the kinds of information lost as a result of this compression. My own experience conducting interviews in the Philippines and elsewhere suggests that people, if they are allowed even small opportunities to elaborate on what they are thinking or to give concrete examples that illustrate what they are trying to say, often express understandings of democracy or its rough equivalents that are multivalent or even contradictory. Consider this short excerpt from a not-so-unusual interview that we conducted with a Commonwealth middle-aged fish vendor:

Interviewer: Do you remember how it was during the time of Marcos? In your opinion, was there demokrasya then?

Fish vendor: Yes, there was.

Interviewer: Why do you say “yes”?

Fish vendor: The prices of basic goods at that time were not as high as they are now. Marcos controlled the prices. Today, prices are so high.

Interviewer: Do you think there is demokrasya in the Philippines today?

Fish vendor: I don’t think so. The prices of commodities are getting higher. People can only afford half a kilo of fish today. The less fortunate families can’t even afford to have fresh fish in their meals these days. If they have fish, it is not fresh. Poor families can’t afford good quality fish. All they can afford are those sold at 10, 15 or 20 pesos per half a kilo. But is that half kilo enough for their family?

Interviewer: So do you think there is demokrasya in the Philippines today?

Fish vendor: Yes. People will go on strike if prices keep going up.

Interviewer: For you, what is the meaning of demokrasya?

Fish vendor: It’s being able to complain about the price increases. You can hear the complaints of the people. You can even read about them in the papers.

Based on her concluding comment, one might infer that this fish vendor understands demokrasya to mean freedom of expression. But there seems to be more to the story, given her statements about low prices during the Marcos era, and given her seemingly contradictory reasoning that there both is and is not demokrasya today in the Philippines. In fact, she appears to be in the grip of a common form of conceptual puzzlement. Demokrasya, like many words in social affairs, has a complex grammar, with meanings that crisscross and overlap in complicated ways. There are, as a result, different or only partially overlapping standards that people can apply when determining whether something “is” or “is not” an instance of demokrasya. Most people we interviewed juggled multiple standards. This woman seems to have two particular standards in mind—freedom of expression and low prices—and applies each one at different moments in the interview.

A shopkeeper we interviewed appears to move between two similar standards:

Shopkeeper: Demokrasya [is] kalayaan; you are free to do what you want.

Interviewer: Is there demokrasya in the Philippines right now?

Shopkeeper: Yes, in some ways. Like where we live, if we complain [to the housing authority] that there’s something wrong in our unit, they would fix it. When I complained about our bathroom, they fixed it. It’s like that, you have the right to complain about anything you don’t like.

Interviewer: Was there demokrasya during the time of Marcos?

Shopkeeper: There was. They provided loans for the poor, like fishing loans. My father was able to get one from the DBP [Development Bank of the Philippines] …. We were able to pay some of it back, but not everything. Because as the sea gets older, the harvest becomes smaller. There was no more catch, and then my father’s equipment broke down. But the bank didn’t try to collect …. For me, it’s an example of demokrasya because they didn’t force us to pay our debts.

For this woman, demokrasya seems to encompass both the freedom to complain and debt forgiveness.

Many of our interviewees explicitly linked the same two standards by voicing the idea that freedom of expression counts as demokrasya only when followed by tangible results—not only low prices or easy bank loans, but also jobs, secure housing, health care, anti-drug programs, or the like. Typical was this excerpt from an interview with a warehouse custodian:

Interviewer: Do you think there is demokrasya in the Philippines today?

Custodian: Yes there is. Some countries don’t have demokrasya and others do.

Interviewer: Why do you say that there is demokrasya in the Philippines?

Custodian: People are given the opportunity to give their opinions. If they have problems, they can explain and something will be done about it. The authorities sometimes listen, but sometimes they just keep on promising and nothing ever happens.

Interviewer: So when the authorities listen to them, that is demokrasya?

Custodian: Yes.

Interviewer: If the authorities don’t act on the problems presented to them, would that still be demokrasya?

Custodian: It would not be demokrasya anymore. You have told them what your problem was, so why didn’t they solve it? You know how our government is sometimes. Some people there are so good at making promises but then fail to fulfill them.

Interviewer: Can you give me an example from here in Commonwealth?

Custodian: Take illegal drugs. We need a police detachment to protect our community against illegal drugs. We should be able to go to the higher authorities, who should listen to our request to help the community. But they [the higher authorities] never actually do anything about the problem.

Interviewer: But if you are able to voice your needs, isn’t that demokrasya?

Custodian: No, because the authorities didn’t do anything. They didn’t act upon the request. Sometimes they just say “yes” and in the end nothing happens. The mayor, for example, sometimes had problems with the finances. The budget would be tight, and they wouldn’t start the project and eventually they would completely forget about it.

For this custodian, as for many people we interviewed, the freedom to voice grievances is a necessary but insufficient part of demokrasya. By their view, people need more than the right to express themselves. For demokrasya to be realized, they also need to be listened and responded to. As a canteen operator put it, “What I understand of demokrasya is that they [people in government] should give in to our requests.” One might say, then, that demokrasya for many in Commonwealth translates into a more robust notion of democracy than the “demokrasya=civil liberties” equation would suggest. It means that people have the right to speak and have what they say acted upon.

The accounts given by the fish vendor, shopkeeper, custodian, and others like them traverse distinctions that are foundational to the analysis of Dalton, Shin, and Jou. The co-authors identify “three broad alternatives” for defining democracy. The word can be defined either (1) in terms of institutions and procedures (namely free and fair elections), (2) as “freedom and liberty … with democratic institutions as the means to achieve them,” or (3) as “social benefits” that “include such social rights as social services, providing for those in need, and ensuring the general welfare of others.”Footnote 20 The writers conclude that “a large proportion of the public in developing nations defines democracy in liberal democratic terms,” because many people around the world define democracy within the boundaries of the second alternative, as opposed to the first and especially the third. But the fish vendor, shopkeeper, and custodian speak of demokrasya in ways that do not fit cleanly into this categoric scheme. They do not talk of “freedom and liberty” as “outcomes” of electoral institutions. They see freedom of expression as a means for securing social benefits. For the custodian (definitely) and the fish vendor and shopkeeper (ambivalently), only when those benefits are obtained can demokrasya be said to exist. Demokrasya, as these interviewees understand it, fits into both the second and third of Dalton, Shin, and Jou’s categories at the same time.

Had the fish vendor, shopkeeper, and custodian been interviewed as part of the Global Barometer Project, Dalton, Shin, and Jou might have coded their answers as belonging to the “freedom and liberty” alternative. When asked directly what demokrasya means, the fish vendor replied above, “It’s being able to complain about the price increases. You can hear the complaints of the people. You can even read about them in the papers.” When the custodian and shopkeeper were asked the same question, in parts of their interviews not reproduced above, they replied, respectively, “We have kalayaan to speak, express our opinions, explain our problems to the government” and “Demokrasya [is] kalayaan; you are free to do what you want.” When given the opportunity to elaborate, however, the fish vendor, shopkeeper, and custodian all articulated ideas that blur the boundary between understanding demokrasya in terms of “freedom and liberty” on the one hand and “social benefits” on the other. These people, it bears keeping in mind, were not idiosyncratic. One out of every four people in Commonwealth who spoke of demokrasya as something like “freedom and liberty” also talked of it in terms of social benefits, often in ways that explicitly linked these two sets of ideas.

The more generalized point is that the short-answer, compressed format of the Global Barometer survey cannot capture the kind of multidimensional thinking evidenced by the fish vendor, shopkeeper, and custodian.Footnote 21 This format replaces the informative messiness of how people actually understand the word in question with telegraphic, single-idea answers.

Compartmentalization

A defender of the Global Barometer open-ended question might reply that the logistical constraints that make compression necessary are mitigated by the opportunity that respondents had, in the 2002 Philippine survey and other surveys as well, to offer up to three responses. Consequently, the argument might go, the survey is able to capture the complexity of each interviewee’s thinking.

In reality, the non-narrative nature of the recorded responses does not allow one to figure out how these responses might fit together. For instance, one person, interviewed in Tagalog for the 2002 Philippine survey, answered—or more accurately was reported as answering (more on this later)—that demokrasya meant kapayapaan ng bansa (peace of the country). For the follow-up “What else?” question, the answer recorded was: may kalayaan na gumawa/kumilos ng lahat ng gusto mo (having kalayaan to do anything you want/act in any way you want). For the second “What else?” prompt, the answer recorded was: mga police hindi above sa yo (the police are not above you). Among other things, we want to know how demokrasya can refer simultaneously to peace and kalayaan. If everyone has kalayaan to do what they want, the outcome might be conflict, not peace. In addition, we want to know how either response is related, if at all, to police not being above everyone else. Given the disconnected way in which the survey responses are recorded, it is hard to discern what the interviewee had in mind.

Scholars who use the Global Barometer survey data do not often raise questions about how meanings fit together, for they do not typically make much of the fact that one individual might be the source of different kinds of answers. Put another way, those who use the Global Barometer data seldom take the individual as a unit of analysis. They code the responses of an individual as if they were free-floating and disconnected, and then report the aggregate frequency of each type of response. For instance, in an Asian Barometer paper analyzing the results of the 2002 and two other surveys from the Philippines, the authors report that interpretations of democracy as “political freedom and civil liberties” occurred more frequently than interpretations of democracy “in broad terms like national unity, solidarity, mutual help, a peaceful life, harmony.”Footnote 22 This compartmentalized way of reporting responses obscures the connections that interviewees might make between the various answers they give. It thereby forfeits deeper insight into how interviewees really understand the meaning of democracy or its rough equivalents in other languages.

Interviews that we conducted in Commonwealth reveal that kalayaan on the one hand, and peace, harmony, and unity on the other, are not distinct or separate ways of thinking about the meaning of demokrasya (just as freedom of expression and social benefits are also not disconnected). They are deeply interrelated. To miss that connection would be to fundamentally misunderstand how people, or at least many people in Commonwealth, understand what demokrasya means. Indeed some interviewees, including this housewife, speak of kalayaan and peace as synonymous:

Interviewer: For you, what is the meaning of kalayaan?

Housewife: Peace [kapayapaan, from the root payapa, which means tranquil, placid, calm, quiet, or peaceful].

Interviewer: What is the meaning of kapayapaan?

Housewife: No trouble.

Interviewer: How would we know whether people in the Philippines have kalayaan?

Housewife: Sometimes there is a lot of trouble. Sometimes there are crime syndicates creating trouble and there is no sense of direction. Things are not in order. There is chaos.

Interviewer: So are you saying that there is kalayaan when things are peaceful?

Housewife: yes, exactly.

An interview with a neighborhood liquefied petroleum gas salesman reveals more clearly how kalayaan and peace are related, and how both are connected to demokrasya:

Interviewer: For you, is demokrasya good or bad?

Salesman: Demokrasya is really good.

Interviewer: Why do you say that?

Salesman: Obviously, we’ll have “freedom of speech” [in English]. We can say anything that we want. You can express your feelings without any fear. But if there is no demokrasya, you can’t do that because you will fear getting arrested or being killed.

Interviewer: What kinds of feelings are you talking about?

Salesman: Well, everything you have to say about what is happening in government or in your community. Anything you would want to say to a politician. An example is when they do something unlawful. If we didn’t have “freedom of speech” we would not be able to say anything about that because we’d fear that they would retaliate against us because of what we said. But since we have “freedom of speech” I have kalayaan to say that because I’m a Filipino citizen.

Interviewer: Can you say anything you want to the politician?

Salesman: Yes, but it depends on the situation. Sometimes people go beyond “freedom of speech.” “Freedom of speech” has boundaries. Our kalayaan does not always mean doing all that we want. Kalayaan was given for our good and we are given it to use it for good deeds. We should always use our “freedom of speech” with good intentions. We should always remind ourselves that we will always have kalayaan to speak, but that we should be in control of it …. Does “freedom of speech” mean that we can say awful things about one another? Of course it doesn’t. I think that is common sense.

Later in the interview:

Interviewer: The word demokrasya comes from the Spanish language. Is there a word of Tagalog origin that means the same thing?

Salesman: The meaning of demokrasya is kalayaan.

Interviewer: What does the word kalayaan mean to you?

Salesman: The word kalayaan means katahimikan [literally “quietness,” but often used, as in this context, to mean something like “peace” or “serenity”]. People would have katahimikan. That is the only other word I can think of to define kalayaan. When there is kalayaan there is katahimikan among people.

Interviewer: When you say katahimikan, what do you mean?

Salesman: Everybody would have “peace of mind” [in English]. We wouldn’t have to worry, wherever we go. We would not fear anything. We would not worry about our economy. We would not fear whoever is elected.

Interviewer: Can you give me an example from here in Commonwealth of what you mean by kalayaan?

Salesman: If we are malaya, there would not be unemployed and out-of-school youths who like to hang out in the streets. There would be no drugs. There would be no swindlers or crooks. There would be kalayaan. Our police would be in constant communication with us. Nobody would commit crimes. Criminals could not run and hide in the squatters’ areas because the residents would have communication with the police. But now, there is no such communication so we don’t have real kalayaan.

Like the housewife, this salesman equates kalayaan with peace, or something like it. This peace seems to flow from the freedom to speak. It is “constant communication” between residents and police that generates peace, at least hypothetically. Many people in Commonwealth are wary of police officers, whom residents perceive to be callous, abusive, and unfair towards the poor in their enforcement of the law. The salesman is implying that if people could feel comfortable communicating freely with the police, there would be peace and lawfulness. Like the vendor, shopkeeper, and custodian, this salesman links freedom of expression to its tangible benefits, and sees both as constitutive of kalayaan and demokrasya.

The salesman also relates the benefit of peace to what he describes as the self-restraint that must accompany kalayaan. People must speak only with “good intentions” and avoid saying “awful things”; people should, in short, “be in control of” what they say. Many people we interviewed similarly held that kalayaan, especially in the context of demokrasya, means that one can say anything one likes, but only if the words spoken are polite and kind. As one man we interviewed conceived it, “there is no true kalayaan because there are limits that should be respected.” Consider too this portion of an interview with a tricycle driver:

Interviewer: For you, what is the meaning of kalayaan?

Driver: You can express what you want to say. Nobody would stop you. Nobody would hinder you. You can say anything you want.

Interviewer: You can say anything you want?

Driver: Yes, as long as it’s not bad.

Interviewer: What do you mean by “bad”?

Driver: There are things that shouldn’t be done. For example, you shouldn’t use mocking words. That is not part of human kalayaan.

Many people we interviewed similarly expressed the idea that kalayaan in human affairs (including demokrasya) requires a good deal of self-discipline. For some, behaving in ways that are civil and respectful appears to be more fundamental to demokrasya than the freedom to act itself. An elderly rag maker explained first how demokrasya means that “people are malaya” and then described how bounded this freedom actually is. “When your child is of the proper age” he said, “and wants to enter a life of marriage, he needs to ask permission from his parents—this is demokrasya. If there were no demokrasya, he would do anything he wants. He could even go to another country.” A food service worker expressed a similar idea when she exclaimed: “Now even a child can say things against the leaders of our country! What kind of demokrasya is that?” For the rag maker and food service worker, the demand for self-restraint inherent in kalayaan is so great that demokrasya becomes tantamount to respecting one’s parents or political leaders.

The comments of the rag maker and food service worker make it hard to equate kalayaan and demokrasya with civil liberties. If these two people had associated demokrasya with civil liberties, then one would have expected the food service worker to talk about the rights of children to speak out against the leaders of the country, and the rag maker to talk about his child’s personal freedom to decide whether to marry or where to travel. But the food service worker and rag maker say the opposite; they emphasize the limits to individual freedom imposed by a need for respect. The boundedness of kalayaan and demokrasya—the requirement of self-restraint—make the words closely related in many interviewees’ minds not only to peace, but also to harmony, order, unity, and the like. Kalayaan and demokrasya, properly circumscribed, beget smooth interpersonal relations.

Returning to the 2002 survey, one can now see how “peace of the country” and “having kalayaan to do anything you want/act in any way you want” and “the police are not above you” might be related. They may well be snippets of a larger narrative not so different from the one provided by the salesman. In this narrative, to put it crudely, demokrasya is constituted by respectful communication that allows people to speak openly with the police, as well as by the peace which results from that communication.

From our interviews in Commonwealth one gains some insight into how understandings of demokrasya and kalayaan are tightly bound up with notions of peace, self-control, and even police approachability. Yet in the 2002 survey, the already compressed “peace of the country,” “having kalayaan to do anything you want/act in any way you want,” and “the police are not above you” were coded as alternate, competing conceptions of democracy. It is important to acknowledge this compartmentalization. Survey researchers can equate kalayaan and demokrasya with civil liberties only by artificially segregating ideas of peace, respect, order, harmony, self-restraint, approachability—as well as things like social benefits—from ideas of freedom. But seven out of every ten people in Commonwealth who spoke of demokrasya in terms of kalayaan also conceived of demokrasya in terms of peace, respect, order, harmony, self-restraint, approachability, or social benefits. For many of these people, kalayaan itself encompassed notions of peace, respect, harmony, or the like. The more one acknowledges that supposed “alternatives” are different dimensions of a larger whole, the less kalayaan and demokrasya can be so easily taken to mean “freedom and liberties.” Insofar as those who work with the Global Barometer surveys typically compartmentalize survey responses in similar ways,Footnote 23 one can only wonder to what extent their substantive findings are also an artifact of the way in which they have collected and coded their data.

Homogenization

The Global Barometer’s open-ended question format conveys the impression that we are hearing from people in their own words. But few actual responses (however compressed and compartmentalized) seem to have been recorded, or at least preserved, verbatim in the 2002 Philippine survey. Rather, it appears that those who recorded or compiled the survey data replaced what many people actually said with glosses. An astonishing 222 respondents interviewed in six different languages were listed as giving exactly the same response: may kalayaan magsalita/kahit anong sabihin masasabi mo/kalayaan sa pananalita a set of Tagalog phrases that we might translate as “having kalayaan to speak/you can say whatever you want to say/kalayaan of expression”; 178 respondents were listed as giving the exact response may kalayaan na gumawa/kumilos ng lahat ng gusto mo (having kalayaan to do anything you want/act in any way you want); and 66 were listed as giving the exact response kalayaan makapagpahayag ng sariling pananaw/sariling opinyon (kalayaan to express one’s own viewpoint/opinion). Together, these three responses account for more than half of all responses recorded.

The obvious danger is that the interviewer or (more likely) compiler may have attributed to the people being interviewed ideas that they did not express, or smoothed over important differences and nuances. A less obvious danger relates to the language in which the responses were reported. People who were interviewed in Bicolano, Cebuano, Ilocano, and Ilonggo—who together made up more than half of the sample that responded to this question—had their answers homogeneously rendered into Tagalog (with some English mixed in), thereby flattening any difference in meaning that might exist between the words actually uttered in these different languages.

More specifically, while respondents may have spoken of kagawasan in Cebuano, wayawaya in Ilocano, kahilwayan in Ilonggo, and katalingkasan in Bicolano, their words were uniformly recorded as “kalayaan” or “freedom.” But these Cebuano, Ilocano, Ilonggo, and Bicolano terms do not share a common etymology. Nor do the terms have meanings that are identical in range to either kalayaan or freedom. Kagawasan is built up from a root that in its most literal sense means “to go out from an enclosed area” but that can range in meaning from “immediate vicinity outside” to “from a foreign country” to “state of being free” to “aside from, except, unless.”Footnote 24 The root of kahilwayan means not only “untrammeled, free to act” but also “well-ordered, well-arranged, well-regulated,” while kahilwayan itself in Ilonggo folk cosmology refers to a mythic Eden-like place of peace and quiet.Footnote 25 The root of wayawaya can mean not only “freedom” but also “leisure time” or “opportunity,” while wayawaya itself can mean both “the power to do as one pleases” and “rightness of mind.”Footnote 26 Katalingkasan bears specific connotations of being disconnected, detached, or unchained.Footnote 27

Let us look more closely at the etymology and meaning of kalayaan. Given the frequency with which Tagalog speakers associate kalayaan with demokrasya—not only in Commonwealth but in the Philippines more generallyFootnote 28—a more extensive discussion of the word’s origins is warranted. Tracing the history of kalayaan provides additional context for making sense of how the people we interviewed understand the term today. As Austin remarked, “a word never—well, hardly ever—shakes off its etymology and its formation.”Footnote 29 In this case, examining what he called the “trailing clouds of etymology”Footnote 30 is a useful adjunct to ordinary language interviewing because it places more clearly into view an aspect of kalayaan’s meaning to Commonwealth residents that has not yet been brought to the fore: its distinctively familial connotations.

Kalayaan is a term of relatively new vintage. Its first documented appearance dates only to 1867, when, as far as we know, it was coined by a Catholic priest named Mariano Sevilla in his translation of a religious booklet that would become the basis for a psalm sung yearly during the May devotions to the Virgin Mary.Footnote 31 He came up with this term to translate the Italian word libertà. Addressed to devotees, the libertà in question was the freedom that awaits those accepted into heaven. It was a freedom to wander about the air, moon, sun, and stars; and between heaven and earth; and to penetrate into the most secret places “without you having the slightest obstacle or slightest fear” (uala munti mang macahahadlang ni camunti mang catacutan).Footnote 32

Sevilla, in translating libertà, apparently sought a word that conveyed connotations of liberalità—liberality.Footnote 33 According to the historian Reynaldo Ileto, the word kalayaan is built from the adjective layaw, the ka- prefix and -an suffix turning the adjective into a noun.Footnote 34 In the 1860s, dictionary writers translated layaw into Spanish with renderings such as caricias (caresses, acts of endearment), halago (praise, demonstration of affection), and acudir á alguno en sus necesidades (to attend to someone’s needs). Layaw, as these definitions only intimate, is a term closely associated with the parent–child relationship. A more contemporary translation of the term would be something like “pampered” or “spoiled.” Given this context, kalayaan apparently also carried connotations of pampering or motherly care, and would have drawn on the Catholic Church’s view of Mary as both queen of heaven and mother of the church. To Sevilla, kalayaan may have meant the freedom to move about without “the slightest obstacle or slightest fear” under the indulgent but watchful care of Mama Mary above.

The transformation of kalayaan into a political term apparently began in the early 1870s. At that time, Sevilla was living with fellow student Marcelo H. del Pilar at the Colegio Real de San José in Manila.Footnote 35 It seems likely that del Pilar—who later would co-found a Tagalog- and Spanish-language newspaper that gave voice to the aspirations of reform-minded nationalists of the Propaganda Movement—learned of this word from Sevilla.Footnote 36 del Pilar was the next known person to use kalayaan, choosing this term to render libertad in an 1882 translation of a Spanish-language essay written by the most renowned Filipino propagandist, José Rizal. Leaders of the Katipunan, a lower-class revolutionary Filipino secret society devoted to achieving independence from Spain, further popularized the word by adopting it as the name of their revolutionary organ in 1896.

Ileto points out that both reform-minded propagandists, such as del Pilar, and revolutionary Katipuneros, such as Andrés Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto, used kalayaan in ways that played on the familial connotations of layaw. This word usage allowed them to frame their political projects as a kind of family drama played out on a national scale.Footnote 37 For reformists, restoring kalayaan required establishing a more caring mother–child relationship between Spain and her Philippine colony. For revolutionaries, kalayaan could be regained only by severing an irreparably abusive relationship with a foreign mother, Spain, and replacing it with a blissful and caring relationship with the original mother, Filipinas.Footnote 38 In its early usage as a political term, then, kalayaan meant freedom of a special sort. For reformists it meant liberality of mother Spain toward her daughter colony. For revolutionaries it meant both the liberation from abusive parental control experienced by a mistreated child, and the bliss experienced by a child reunited with a loving mother. Shared by reformists and revolutionaries was a conception of kalayaan in familial, affectionate terms. It was a kind of freedom that required the indulgence of a compassionate mother.

Both reformists and revolutionaries found the neologism kalayaan appealing. But other Tagalog terms already existed that roughly conveyed the idea of freedom. Before the 1880s, dictionary writers regularly translated the Spanish word libertad into Tagalog as timawa or kamaharlikaan. These Tagalog words derive from timawa and maharlika, two related social groups that existed in pre-colonial Tagalog-speaking areas of the Philippines. The timawa and maharlika were, roughly, “free people” who stood in the middle of the social hierarchy. Above were chiefly maginoo; below were debt-bound alipin. Unlike the maginoo, the timawa and maharlika did not constitute a ruling group. Unlike the alipin, the timawa and maharlika were free to transfer their loyalty from one maginoo to another.Footnote 39 The freedom enjoyed by the maharlika and timawa was, as one historian put it, the “right to shift allegiance from one maginoo to another … but they were not free in the sense that they had no chief at all.”Footnote 40

Reformists and revolutionaries used timawa only occasionally to mean freedom, and kamaharlikaan more rarely still. We can only speculate about why they preferred kalayaan, but it seems reasonable to conclude that the language of familial intimacy better reflected their political imaginaries than did the language of social class. Nationalists of both kinds apparently saw, or saw fit to represent, the relationship of Spain to the Philippines as having closer parallels to the relationship of mother to child than to the relationship of chiefs to their underlings.

I introduce these historical details about kalayaan because they shed light on the present. Current usage of the term by many people we interviewed in Commonwealth reproduces the family-modeled morality of the late nineteenth century. For many in Commonwealth, as in the nineteenth century, kalayaan requires that those in positions of power (who today include parents, teachers, police officers, bank officials, government leaders, and the like) treat those under their authority with kindness. Recall what the shopkeeper had to say about kalayaan and demokrasya. They existed because bank officials treated her family with consideration by not demanding repayment.

Many interviewees spoke of the compassion connoted by kalayaan and demokrasya in an idiom that draws directly from family life. Typical is what a high-school social studies teacher had to say about the kind of kalayaan that she sees as constituting demokrasya:

Interviewer: In your opinion, is demokrasya good or bad?

Teacher: It’s good because people really want to have kalayaan. It’s inherent in human nature to be malaya, to be malaya in oneself.

Interviewer: What do you mean by “to be malaya in oneself”?

Teacher: To not be hindered in expressing what you feel. Whatever you are thinking, you can say it out loud.

Interviewer: Say it to whom?

Teacher: Let me focus on the family as an example. Parents shouldn’t dominate their children …. They should be friendly, so that their children can see their concern, can see that they really care, that they have love there.

Interviewer: And if there are differences, how do they get settled? Who decides?

Teacher: If there is disagreement between parents and children, the parents should be the ones to settle it. It should be the father because it’s his responsibility. And the wife should support her husband in making the decision.

What initially sounds like an explanation of how demokrasya entails freedom of speech—an account that might lead us to conclude that the teacher had something like civil liberties in mind—morphs into an explanation of how the kalayaan of demokrasya requires parents to treat their children with tenderness. In the end, at stake is not the protection of the individual by means of civil liberties (nor the kind of participatory decision-making an American teacher might reference when talking about “democracy” in the family). Central to kalayaan and demokrasya are the leniency and compassion of those in a position of authority.

To many Commonwealth residents, a major problem with Philippine demokrasya today is that people—the poor in particular—are not properly cared for, be it by the police (as we have seen) or by other people in government. When we asked an office worker if he thought that there is demokrasya in the Philippines today, he answered this way:

Demokrasya is just hypocrisy …. The candidates say [the poor] are the people who need help but they don’t actually help them …. As a leader in the government you have to help them. The poor are like babies who still don’t know how to live. The [leaders] are grownups who already know how to live. The reason why you are in the government is for you to manage the country because there are still lots of babies.

By this conception, kalayaan and demokrasya require that those in positions of power treat with consideration those under their care, purview, or influence. This idea was fairly widespread among those we interviewed: one in three people spoke of kalayaan or demokrasya in this way.

We see more clearly now why it is problematic to equate kalayaan with civil liberties. Civil liberties exist within or are constituted by a bubble of non-interference surrounding the individual. In this sense, they correspond to Isaiah Berlin’s understanding of negative liberty, which he described as “simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others.”Footnote 41 To a few people we interviewed, the kalayaan of demokrasya refers to this kind of non-interference, to barriers put up against trespassing. Recall the unemployed woman who defined demokrasya as not being “suppressed by the people in government.” But others did not conceive of kalayaan or demokrasya in terms of barriers. When the shopkeeper brought up the leniency of bank officials, when the rag maker and food service worker talked of self-restraint, when the salesman spoke of open communication with the police, and when the office worker described political leaders as grownups and the poor as babies, at issue was not establishing a zone of individual sovereignty or a frontier of personal freedom that others are not allowed to trespass. What counted as kalayaan or demokrasya were the terms of engagement—when others should be moved to intervene and how that intervention should be regulated. These interviewees seemed to saying that for an intervention to be consistent with kalayaan or demokrasya, it must be motivated by compassion, kindness, and caring, and be enacted with respect, courtesy, and self-restraint. We might recast this same idea metaphorically and think of interventions into personal affairs as traffic. If civil liberties are road blocks put up to keep unwanted vehicles out, kalayaan and demokrasya for many interviewees instead establish rules of the road that must be obeyed.

Kalayaan, in a nutshell, has a distinct history that apparently reverberates to this day, a history not shared by its rough equivalents in either English or other indigenous Philippine languages. Yet survey researchers homogenized the meanings of these words. They hid any possible occurrences of kagawasan, wayawaya, kahilwayan, katalingkasan, or other similar terms by reporting all results in English or Tagalog. They also treated freedom and kalayaan as twins, and construed references to kalayaan as straightforward instances of civil-liberty thinking.

Expanding this set of reflections beyond Commonwealth and the Philippines, we see that the problem of homogenization is widespread among the various national iterations of the Global Barometer Project. The flattening of differences between languages is even starker in Barometer surveys conducted elsewhere in Asia. In the 2006 Thailand survey, interviews were conducted in Thai and Malay, but the results were reported only in English. The same reporting procedure was used in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, and Mongolia, among other places. Even the results of the 2005 Philippine survey were reported only in English. This is one reason why I chose to analyze the earlier 2002 survey instead—it is simply less homogenized.Footnote 42 Also common to many Global Barometer surveys is the large-scale recurrence of identical responses. To give just one example, in the 2000 South Africa survey, 464 people—20 percent of the sample—speaking ten different languages were recorded as giving the homogenized-into-English (and compressed) answer “freedom in general.”

The problem is that research conducted in Asia, Africa, and beyond shows that freedom or liberty and their rough equivalents in other languages do not necessarily mean the same thing.Footnote 43 Inferring references to civil liberties when people around the world use words that coders translate roughly as “freedom” may be just as problematic elsewhere as it is in Commonwealth.

Concluding Thoughts

Compression, compartmentalization, and homogenization may strike the reader as necessary concessions that one must make to generate data on meanings of democracy that are globally comparable. The combined effect of these three problems, however, calls into question the value of such data. It also potentially undermines the claim that people worldwide see democracy or its rough equivalents through the same liberal lens.

At least one survey researcher arrived at a similar conclusion in a moment of sober reflection. Bratton, who spoke of “a regime of civil liberties” as providing a “common pattern of shared meaning across all world regions,”Footnote 44 wrote in another paper shortly thereafter:

We do not know whether all survey respondents conceive of freedom in the same way …. Thus it seems presumptuous to base the comparative study of public attitudes about democracy on the assumption that all people understand democracy simply as freedom.Footnote 45

It seems presumptuous indeed. By means of compression, compartmentalization, and homogenization, Global Barometer researchers have simplified, domesticated, and falsely twinned words with diversely rich grammars. They have flattened nuance, ambivalence, multivalence, and difference. Kalayaan, the key term examined in this article, is a complex word that can mean not only the freedom to do or say what one wants, but—at least for most people we interviewed in Commonwealth—also peace, self-restraint, indulgent caring, and the power to have one’s demands acted upon, among other things. Kalayaan does not mean precisely the same thing as freedom, nor does either term mean exactly the same thing as words like kagawasan, wayawaya, kahilwayan, or katalingkasan. The various meanings of kalayaan itself, furthermore, do not constitute contrasting “alternatives.” They are connected and interrelated in numerous ways. Survey researchers have filtered away this complexity and these relationships, and what remains is artificially pure.

The people we interviewed in Commonwealth—despite surface appearances—do not confirm the generalization that “a large proportion of the public in developing nations define democracy in liberal-democratic terms,” as Dalton, Shin, and Jou might have it.Footnote 46 The misleading equation of kalayaan, and by extension demokrasya, with civil liberties is the result of problems generic to the survey-research practices from which this conclusion is derived. What confidence, then, can we have that analogous problems do not exist elsewhere? Do the survey data really support the claim that around the world people’s views of “democracy” are really “surprisingly consistent”? If compression, compartmentalization, and homogenization are manifest not only in the 2002 Philippine survey, but in other Global Barometer surveys as well, then consistency is the product not of converging worldviews but of specific procedures used to record, code, and interpret interview responses. If such is the case, then consistency has not been discovered; it has been subtly manufactured.

Survey researchers could remedy some of the problems identified in this article. They could reduce homogenization by implementing surveys more carefully. For example, they could record responses verbatim and report results in the original language in which the interview was conducted. Researchers could also reduce compartmentalization by adopting a more integrated analytic framework, one which allows them to systematically investigate connections between different kinds of answers. Such a framework might be provided by the type of cluster analysis advocated by Andreas Schedler and Rodolfo Sarsfield or the ordering Q methodology espoused by Steven Brown.Footnote 47 It may also be possible to use the results of interpretive investigation to build better closed-ended survey questions. Laura Stoker, for one, proposes the “multistage” approach of Elizabeth Theiss-Morse et al.’s study of patriotism and citizen participation as a template for how that work might be done.Footnote 48 While I do not dismiss outright the value of such multistage work, I find the interpretive foundations of this particular study to be excessively thin. It is not a straightforward enterprise to translate complex conceptual insights into a short series of closed-ended questions.

Other survey researchers have been experimenting with alternative techniques to compensate for shortcomings in open-ended survey questions, but these alternatives do not escape the problems identified in this article. Most notable among these experiments is the use of “anchoring vignettes” in Afrobarometer surveys as described by Bratton.Footnote 49 This survey technique elicits responses to hypothetical examples as a way to “measur[e] complicated concepts” and correct for “the incomparability of responses to survey questions.”Footnote 50 Whatever the useful purposes of anchoring vignettes (and there are several), this questioning strategy does not reveal how respondents understand the concept under investigation. As the developers of this approach concede, “what we are measuring in fact is no more or less than the concept defined in the vignette definitions.”Footnote 51 Vignettes, that is, cannot help us understand what respondents mean by democracy or its rough equivalents in other languages because the use of vignettes is premised on the researcher already possessing such an understanding.

None of these remedies, in short, addresses the fundamental problem of compression, and the loss of information which results. The demands of compression, imposed by the survey instrument, leave little space for people to articulate their thoughts. But democracy and its rough equivalents in other languages have intricate grammars. The multivalence, puzzlement, ambivalence, and contradiction that characterize how people understand such terms can be gainfully explored only by providing people expansive opportunities to express their thoughts, and to reflect on the complexity of what they are saying. None of this is likely to happen when people answer closed-ended questions or give thinly compressed answers to survey questions that are only nominally open-ended.Footnote 52

The meanings of democracy and it rough equivalents in other languages are richly complex, multidimensional, and contradictory. If we are to investigate seriously how people understand such terms, then we need an approach that provides people opportunities to articulate the connections that they themselves make between meanings, the complexities that they themselves grapple with, and the conceptual puzzles that they themselves have not been able to solve. Understanding local meaning requires what Gilbert Ryle, and Clifford Geertz after him, have called “thick” description—description that is circumstance-attached and embedded in deeper structures of significance.Footnote 53 Ryle likened thick description to a “many-layered sandwich” and thin description to “only the bottom slice.”Footnote 54 Wittgenstein used a different nutritional metaphor to get at a similar idea, for he saw “a main cause of philosophical disease” to be “a one-sided diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example.”Footnote 55 A well-rounded diet, to Wittgenstein, requires looking at and comparing a whole range of word-use examples, just as he looked at and compared a variety of things we call “games.”Footnote 56 Eating a balanced diet or hearty sandwich necessitates feeding our thinking with many kinds of examples, and taking into account the larger structures of significance that give meaning to these examples.

Interpretive techniques such as ordinary language interviewing are expressly adapted to this type of undertaking. Ordinary language interviewing is designed to elicit concrete word-use examples, probe connections that people themselves make between examples, explore contradictions, and investigate larger ideals to which examples are tethered. Making comparisons on the basis of ordinary language interviewing, to be sure, only permits us to draw conclusions that are at best untidy. As Wittgenstein himself found in his analysis of games, “we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing.”Footnote 57 We must acknowledge that some kinds of comparison cannot be made neatly.

We must also acknowledge, based on the case-study knowledge that we already have, that democracy does not mean the “same thing” everywhere.Footnote 58 Complicated networks of similarity and difference exist between democracy and its rough equivalents around the world. To the extent that we would like to believe (for reasons either normative or analytic) that people around the globe conceive of the political world in largely familiar ways, this conceptual diversity is disquieting. Among other things, it unsettles the logic behind democracy-promotion projects—of which the failed American effort to install liberal democracy in Iraq is only the most spectacular example—that are premised on people in whatever place both conceiving of democracy in liberal terms and desiring it.Footnote 59 It also raises uncomfortable questions about whether Global Barometer research on the meaning of democracy might be used to advance similarly ill-conceived projects in the future. The “discovery” that people the world over share a liberal conception of democracy, I fear, may be used yet again to legitimate the hegemonic reach of great powers.Footnote 60 Still, recognizing that people are diverse in their foundational understandings of politics, that things can be conceived otherwise, also presents us with an opportunity. It creates space for a kind of self-reflection that is potentially liberating. It provides an opening to ask what we should make, both morally and politically, of the contingency and particularism of our own common sense.