 good evening, depending on where you are, ambassadors, representatives of international ideas, member states, distinguished colleagues, and friends all. It is great to have so many of you joining from all over the world. My name is Kevin Casasamora. I am the Secretary-General of International Idea. On behalf of our Institute, it is my pleasure to welcome you to this event to present the results of our Perceptions of Democracy Survey. At International Idea, we take pride in being an intergovernmental organization that both knows and grows democracy, alongside our long-standing thematic and programmatic expertise in areas like elections, constitution-building processes, and political participation and representation. Over the past few years, we have grown a work stream focused on assessing the quality and the performance of democracy global. This last dimension of our work has, in quite a short time, established itself as a core knowledge area and a core area in the contribution of our Institute. And as with the rest of our efforts, this line of work continues to evolve as we refine our methodologies, always with the aim of better helping democracies to meet their full potential. In this spirit, I'm very pleased to be with you today to launch a new and important report, the results of a groundbreaking survey on Perceptions of Democracy among people around the world. In a few minutes, you will hear more about the survey findings from our head of democracy assessment, my dear colleague Dr. Sima Shah. But in these opening remarks, I want to do very briefly two things. First, I will outline how the Perceptions of Democracy Survey complements our flagship knowledge project, the Global State of Democracy Initiative. And second, I will highlight some key takeaways from the survey in terms of how to think about and support democracy. As many of you know, International Ideas Global State of Democracy Initiative provides data and evidence-based analysis on the quality of democracy globally. This work is a key expression of our Institute's global identity and expertise, combining nuanced analysis, regional insights, and an appreciation of democracy's diversity. The survey that you will hear about today is also global, featuring representative samples from 19 countries with broad geographic and democratic diversity. But while the Global State of Democracy Initiative has been so far a quantitative and qualitative assessment of how democracy is doing based on 157 individual indicators across 20 expert sources, the Perceptions of Democracy Survey draws on inputs from a different kind of practitioner of democracy, namely, citizens. And I don't want to steal Sima's thunder, but one central finding from this exercise is that these two approaches produce very different results when it comes to evaluating if and how democracies are delivering. Our survey suggests that people are generally much more skeptical than experts about the state of democracy in their countries. What's more, the most marginalized members of society are the least satisfied with their democracy and the least trusting in its institutions. So what does all this mean for efforts to support democracy? Again, Sima will share more ideas in greater detail. In a nutshell, though, we must accept that people can be deeply dissatisfied with democracy to the point of being open to authoritarian options, even where experts indicators for democracy are strong. You know, whatever case we or experts may make for democracy in the abstract, people do notice when their rights are not being protected in an adequate way and when democracy is not working for them. Those of us striving to advance and protect democracy should reflect this reality across our work. In our research, we ought to make sure that our methodologists integrate public perceptions in a much more systematic way and that we make a better effort to understand what drives trust in democratic institutions, what drives it up and what drives it down. In our capacity development efforts, we should give more salience to initiatives aimed at building public confidence and trust because weak trust on the part of citizens is eating away democratic legitimacy. In our advocacy efforts, we should be more honest about the gap between the arguments that we use to defend democracy and the way in which democracy is perceived by many people. In other words, this survey highlights the need for a systematic effort by the democracy support community to understand and improve the perception of democracy in the eyes of its most important stakeholders, the people. It is well-nigh impossible to protect democracy around the world, which is what we are trying to do here. If we don't understand better what's in the mind of citizens when they think about democracy, the evidence-driven call to action that this survey represents is an excellent example of the value generated by the core contributions of international ideas member states, which allow us to launch initiatives like this one. We are now looking for additional partners to make this survey the first in a series tracking public perceptions over time. If inclusive representative democracy matters to you and you would like to join us in this mission, please reach out. Ultimately, the measure of a survey's value lies in the value of what it measures. This survey measures the only way a democracy can be truly strong by building up public trust. Its findings certainly offer costs for concern, but also they offer valuable new guidance for shared work to strengthen government all, for and by the people. So once again, thank you all for being here and Sema, over to you. Thank you so much, Kevin. Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning to everybody. Thank you for taking the time to attend and to hear the findings of one of our international ideas newest knowledge resources called the Perceptions of Democracy Survey, which we are calling POT. We commissioned the survey for two primary reasons. One is to compare expert views to popular assessments. And the second is to compare the views of marginalized groups to nationally represented examples. In this way, we aim to do what we think few others do, which is to offer an initial response to the loud pushback we're hearing against the sole use of expert coded data in democracy assessment. This is our first contribution to this debate. And second is to show why and how democracy may not be delivering for everyone in the same way. We believe that understanding that gap may be key to developing stronger and better reforms going forward. This survey and this launch event is very generously funded by international ideas member states as well as by the Robert Bosch Foundation. So now we'll start with a quick overview of how the POT survey works. The first thing to note is that we surveyed respondents in 19 countries around the world. The way we selected these countries was that we wanted to cover every region in which international idea works. We included the three largest democracies, the US, India and Brazil. We also made a special effort to include countries that are usually not covered in these kinds of global surveys. And we also looked for diversity in terms of homogeneity of a population, level of wealth and level of democratization. The survey covers nine very broad themes. This first report covers the first five, but future reports using the same data set will delve into the other themes as well as go deeper into the ones that we're covering in this first report. And now for the findings. I just want to emphasize that what I'm about to tell you are very high level findings. I'm not going to, I don't have the time to go into very detailed analysis, but I hope that what I tell you just now will prompt you to read. The first question we asked was about credible elections. This is the question. And you can see that people were asked to provide an assessment of the most recent election in their country along this five scale. The first thing to note is that as Kevin said, people are quite skeptical. You can see here on the graph, in the graph on the left, that in 11 of the 19 countries we surveyed, less than half of the people say that the last election was free and fair. On the right, the graph shows you the relationship between expert views, which are on the X axis, and which range from zero to one with one being the highest, and the Y axis, which shows you the proportion of people who agreed that the last election was free and fair. So there is a relationship. The more likely an expert is to assess an election as free and fair or credible, the more likely a person is to agree with that assessment. But the levels of agreement are strikingly low. Look at Taiwan, for example, the X axis shows you that Taiwan is considered high performing by our experts in terms of electoral credibility. But you can see on the Y axis that only 40% of respondents agreed with that. Tanzania stands out but for the opposite reason. It is considered low performing by our experts, but 80% of respondents assessed elections positively. In the majority of countries in our survey, minorities were less confident that majority groups about the credibility of electoral processes. This gap is especially notable in places like Chile, Denmark, India, and Taiwan. In some places, though, minorities actually had more faith in the credibility of elections than other groups. This was the case in Brazil, the Gambia, and Italy. And even in the US, where a number of recent laws have made it more difficult for racial and ethnic minorities to vote, minorities expressed greater faith in the credibility of elections. In most countries, those in the lowest income levels saw elections as less credible than their fellow citizens. It is interesting to note that in countries like South Korea and the US, Sierra Leone and Denmark, and Senegal and Italy, we have very similar views of low income groups who have these negative evaluations. This is striking given the varied underlying contexts of these countries. The next question has to do with courts. This is the question we asked. People were given these options with which to assess access to justice. It was only in one country, Denmark, where more than half of respondents felt positively about the court's ability to deliver justice. In most countries, less than a third of the respondents felt this way. On the right, you can again see the relationship between expert and popular views. And again, a few countries stand out. Iraq has one of the lowest experts assessments in this data set. But Iraqis have almost as much confidence in their courts as the Taiwanese, and more in fact than Americans. Both Taiwan and the US are ranked highly by experts. Running in the opposite direction, Italians have a negative view of access to justice in their courts, with less than 10% responding that courts always are often provide access to justice. This is a similar level of faith to those in Brazil, despite, again, a wide difference in expert assessments. In at least 15 of the countries surveyed, minority groups express less confidence in the courts than other groups. Look at Italy, where there is a gap of 21 points between minorities and others who feel that courts rarely or never deliver justice. This gap is 20 points in Taiwan, and 17 points in Colombia. The fact that apart from Colombia, these countries perform well in expert measures, emphasizes both the importance of asking citizens about their views, and disaggregating these responses by social group. Interestingly, there are three notable exceptions. One is in Brazil, one is in Sierra Leone, and one is in Tanzania, where more people who identify as minorities had higher levels of confidence, although you can see here that the gaps are quite small. And then you can see that also in 15 countries, low income respondents were more likely to say that courts never provide equal access to justice. Look at Denmark, Taiwan, and the US. All considered high performing in our expert coded data, but where there are more frequent never and rarely responses to this question. However, if you look at the bottom two rows on the graph, you can see that those in the lowest income category surveyed in Colombia, Sierra Leone, and the Solomon Islands, marginally more likely to say that courts actually do provide justice. So more research is needed into these findings. The same pattern holds for women, although there were exceptions. Women are more positive about the possibility of achieving a just outcome from court proceedings in Taiwan, Romania, and Senegal. The next question had to do with freedom of expression. We asked people if they felt that they have the freedom to publicly say how they feel. Respondents could provide their assessments based on the size scale. The freedom of expression assessments are generally more positive. You can see on the in the graph on the left that in most countries, a majority of people do feel that they can express themselves publicly. And again, you can see on the right that there is a relationship between expert and popular views. But what is again striking is that even in places where experts consider the freedom of expression to be strongly respected, the proportion of the public who agrees is low. Look at Romania, Senegal, South Korea, and the US. These are all high performing according to experts, but relatively small numbers of people felt that they could exercise this freedom. Marginalized groups around the world have different experiences with regard to this particular right. Minorities in Tanzania, Senegal, and Sierra Leone are more likely to say that they always or usually have the freedom to speak publicly. Although here again, you can see that those gaps are small. But minorities in Denmark are 14 points less likely to say that they have the freedom to speak freely. The same disparity occurs in Chile, Lithuania, and Taiwan. It is not worthy that minorities who feel most constrained relative to majority groups are in some of the highest performing and wealthiest countries in our data set. Freedom of expression is also frequently experienced unequally across income groups, both in places where there are significant minority populations and in more homogenous states. Even in high performing democracies like Denmark, where the low income cohort is 15 points less likely than the rest of the population to usually or always feel able to exercise their freedom of expression. Differences in the freedom of expression are also clear between men and women. Here, the red dots represent women and the blue represent men in nearly every country in the data set. Women are less able to speak freely in public than men. This disparity is particularly stark in Iraq, Senegal, and the Solomon Islands. Institutions are only part of the picture. It is also important to understand the values that underpin people's world views. We ask people to tell us if they had favorable and unfavorable thoughts about strong leaders who don't have to bother with parliaments and elections. And then we ask them to tell us the degree of those favorable and unfavorable feelings. The responses reveal several important points. First, it is only in two countries, Tanzania and India, where half or more than half feel positively about this kind of strong leader. Second, living in a strong democracy does not guarantee a rejection of non-democratic leadership. In Denmark, which sits at the top of our global state of democracy rankings in every category, a quarter of respondents have some degree of favorable feeling about this kind of strong, undemocratic leader. There is no country, in fact, in which a majority of respondents have extremely unfavorable thoughts about non-democratic leadership. Internationally, the most common predisposition was actually to lack any sort of negative feeling towards this kind of leader. This is a critical point demonstrating that democracy may not be an obvious good to everyone and highlighting how important it is to consistently prove and defend its benefits. Given these values, we wanted to know if people are satisfied with their governments. You can see the question we asked here on the left and on the right, you can see the proportion of people who express some degree of satisfaction. In 17 of the 19 countries, less than half of the people surveyed said they're satisfied. It was only in India and Tanzania where a majority of the population said they had any degree of satisfaction. In most countries, it was less than a third who felt this way. In about half the context, minority groups are more likely to be dissatisfied than others. Looking at the top row of the graph, you can see that in Taiwan, Italy, the US, and Denmark, the gap between minorities and others particularly stark. These four countries also stand out because that is where the people in the low-income brackets have the biggest gap compared to others. This suggests both an overlap between these two groups, minorities and low-income groups, and the effect of intersectional discrimination in these wealthy, high-performing states. It is also worth noting that in Sierra Leone, Romania, Brazil, and Colombia, low-income groups say they are more satisfied than others. We then ask people how they feel about progress. We ask them if they feel their situation has improved compared to their parents. It was only in four countries, the Gambia, Brazil, Lithuania, and Denmark where a majority said they feel they're doing better economically than their parents. These four right here at the top. In Lebanon, 70% said that they were decidedly worse off than previous generations, followed by Iraq and Italy, at 48% and 45% respectively. In at least 12 of the countries, minorities believe they are worse off than their parents, more so than other groups do. In a trio of wealthy European states, Denmark, Italy, and Lithuania, minorities tend to be significantly more pessimistic. Conversely, it is in Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Pennsylvania where minorities claim to be better off or doing the same as their parents, although, again, the gaps are small there. Overall, it is important to note that a majority of people outside of the low-income group agree in 18 of the 19 countries that they're better off than their parents. However, the difference between the trajectories of those inside and outside the low-income groups are really stark. Although 53% of Danes in the low-income group believe they are doing the same or better than their parents, this is 24 points lower than the same sentiment in other groups. In Taiwan, this gap is 18 points, in the U.S., it's 19 points, and in South Korea, it's 23 points. So overall, what can we say? First, people have relatively low levels of confidence in elections and the courts, two of the bedrock institutions of democracy. Notably, these were two of the institutions most negatively impacted in our global state of democracy report findings last year. Secondly, although experts have been warning of declining freedom of expression for years, majorities of people say they actually have confidence in respect for this right. Third, individuals don't see non-democratic leaders in a black and white way. There are lots of gray areas that merit further attention. Fourth, people tend to be more dissatisfied with their governments than satisfied, which is unsurprising given that most also don't feel that their situations are better than that of previous generations. And finally, across the board, marginalized groups tend to be more skeptical and dissatisfied than other respondents, which speaks to a serious gap in the delivery of democratic dividends. So now, what can we do? Our report includes a series of recommendations for a variety of stakeholders, and it also includes a list of research questions that we think merit a lot of attention. But to save time, I'm just going to highlight the very high-level recommendations right now. First, it is clear to us that we need more data on what is happening inside a country between various social groups. This approach should become more standard in survey research and also in research studies. Democracy assessment organizations must also do a better job of finding ways to integrate public perception alongside expert data. We do not believe that expert data is better than or worse than public perception data. What we do believe is that finding a way to represent both views gives us a more holistic picture of the state of democracy. And finally, we believe that civil society continues to be a key partner. They should help us continue to advocate for this kind of disaggregated data and importantly use the disaggregated data in their advocacy campaigns. We hope that you will read the report, engage with it, and be in touch with us if you have further questions. Thank you very much for your attention. I'll now turn the floor over to our panelists and our moderator, the head of our gender and inclusion team. Rumi, I give the floor to you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sima. That was a very substantive and also insightful outline and overview. In that regard, I would like to turn to our panelists, Antia Shedler, who is the program director for democracy at Robert Bush Stifton and our colleague Massimo Tomasoli, who is the director of global programs at International Idea. Can I just start off with you, Antia, because I am reflecting and trying to process the issues that Sima highlighted in light of the findings and I'm just wondering from your perspective, what was most striking or important to you about the survey findings and why is it that because we are hoping after this more and more people would like to read the report but at the same time we need to kick start those reflections by having your thoughts as a lead authority in this regard. Over to you, Antia, please. Thank you and first of all, let me say thank you for having me and Sima, thank you for running us through the results of the survey. I think what's most striking or most important is to really understand people's disappointment with democracy and to really take this seriously, the data that we've just been presented, they show a substantial dissatisfaction and maybe even pessimism about electoral processes, about access to justice, about the right to exercise freedom of speech and also with the performance of the respective governments. I think this is yet another indicator for all of us who are working in the democracy fields that this is a direct call to action and that we really have a lot still to do and ahead of us. I think what stuck out for me, I was not so much surprised about the levels of dissatisfaction when it came to women, when it came to members of self-identified minorities or low income groups. What surprised me to a certain extent is how pessimistic people looked at progress over time. This is something that I somehow did not expect that only in four of the 19 surveyed countries people felt they were better off than the generation prior to them and I think this in our intergenerational comparison is something that we should also take into consideration. Thank you, thank you so much. Can I send to you Massimo, if you can also share your reflections, what is the most striking or important to you about the findings of the survey and why please? Well I agree with Antie that that element of the level of ambition that development should in fact deliver change for people and is not reflected in what was called the delivery side of democratic institutions. So that is a very striking example and I can feel it. I'm from Italy and I look at the results in Italy and it is true that in Italy there is an issue in terms of social mobility. Young generations do not feel that they are better off than their parents and that irrespective of the actual experience of their parents who actually were in a much worse economic situation and still had the hope to improve over there the grandparents of the respondents of today. And Italy is an established democracy so we have to worry about this and I think what is the value of the survey tool like the one we are launching today is that policy makers may look at the power of disaggregation. I've been participating in the negotiations on the 2030 agenda for sustainable development and many members states stressed the importance of disaggregating data and halfway through the implementation of that agenda I haven't seen much analysis based on disaggregation. In this case for example for those working on gender equality and democracy it is very important to look at the perception of women in terms of freedom of expression. There is still a lot that needs to be done without that disaggregation we wouldn't see that. Thank you, thank you Massimo and once I still have you on the floor I want to pause the second question then I will cross over to Ancia. So in this regard what do you think this finding should or could also help in terms of influencing the changes in terms of the way we think about the link between democracy and development and it's something that you are alluded to so if you can explore a bit further on that in that regard. Well in fact the perception of democracy is a social construct and it is based both on experience and beliefs. The experience is mediated by the actual relationship with the state, with the public services and this is exactly what Sima was alluded to when talking about the delivery of democratic institutions. So in order to change the perception we need really first and foremost to make sure that the experience changes and that experience will bring about definitely the change also in the support for democratic development because it delivers also in terms of development. The other aspect which is important is the beliefs and values and there is still a level of ambition even in those who are actually seeing less in their responses less support for a more democratic society and I think that is where we should work more. Changing, shifting the gear in order to improve the awareness is something where we should invest more probably in terms of education and even intergenerational change. Thank you. Just to come back to you Antia and maybe at some point Kevin I know you might actually be burning to say something. I'll come back to you I know your posture but I'll come back to you after Antia. I want to come back to Antia because it's something that you mentioned as well which connects with this second person about the changes in the way we think about the link between democracy and development. Can you pick up a bit further on that because you mentioned it in connection to the issues around economic progress when you were sharing the most striking or important findings of the circle. Please. Thank you. Yeah I would like to come back to something that Kevin said earlier and I think what you described as democracy diversity when SEMA presented the data in the report I think we could see striking differences between countries in the various categories and I think what the data tells us is that we really need to take a look into each and every country particularly the composition of each and every society and then learn from each other. I think what would be of research interest is peer-to-peer learning to let actors from different countries talk to each other and sort of exchange views and maybe best practices on why the perception of various democratic factors in their respective countries play out the way they do and then see why we have sometimes striking differences also between the experts point of view and then people's position. So I think these data points are really good indicators for what we need to explore further and where we need to dig a little deeper particularly with a look to the most marginalized in each of the countries in order to understand better what the drivers in various democracies are which Kevin described as democracy diversity I think this is really what comes out clearly here. Thank you. I want to pick up on the findings in terms of the highlights that Sima gave but also the recommendations and maybe in a minute give Kevin an opportunity to at least you know share his reflections. What then do you hope you know this outcome the findings of the perceptions of democracy will inspire and motivate us in our field of working democracy but beyond that because we know it's not just about democracy there are all these interconnected elements that we spoke about freedom of expression perceptions socially culturally driven what do you think or what kind of actions do you think should come up and really be implemented also is a response to the key recommendations that Sima provided broadly and then I'll circle back to Anette and Massimo and then we can conclude. Thank you Roombie and colleagues I mean this is yeah the reason why I want to say something is that this is fantastically stimulating I think I mean look the the the obvious recommendation is that there's a there's a sore need to incorporate all the types of sources into the the inquiries that we make about the state of of of democracy and we should do that in a systematic in a systematic way because obviously you know good as they are many of the sources that we are using when we assess the performance of democracy so only tell part of the story but then in a more practical way I guess this is this this poses very tricky questions about the the need to make sure and we know this the need to make sure that democracies deliver to social expectations because I mean what I'm seeing here I mean this question I mean when if you had asked me what my you know what findings struck me in the survey I would say two I mean one has been mentioned here this pessimism about the you know the fact that you see yourself and I imagine it would be interesting to see whether young people are I mean this attitude of pessimism with regards to the their welfare compared to the welfare of previous generations is even more entrenched among young people and particularly for I mean I'm going to be very careful in what I say here because particularly for western countries this is uncharted territory I mean I would say that ever since the industrial revolution one of the unwritten assumptions of all this is that your children would have better chances in life than and you did a we're in a different place now I don't know fully what the implications of that are but I can only surmise that they are fairly substantial particularly in terms of the I mean if that's the entrenched perception I have to imagine that people have a greater eagerness to look for alternatives when it comes to political systems if you don't have any sense that the current political dispensation is going to bring welfare to your children well you cast about for alternatives number one and number two I mean I'll be very impolite here but I guess in some one of the organizers I have the right to be impolite I give you immunity well I mean to some extent I mean what I have to say that one of the striking findings is in this is that the two countries that show the more positive attitudes towards authoritarian styles of leadership are the two countries the only two countries that show positive levels of satisfaction with government I mean there has to be something there something worth inquiring I mean that poses very troubling questions for a for for democracy you know there has to be something there I don't think that's that's random thank you so I'll leave it at that yeah so now in regards to health there has to be something there and it what do you see is that something there that we need to do in order to follow up on the outcomes of the survey yeah if you allow me I would like to very completely link this to our work at the Boba Bush Foundation yes please in in the projects that we run or that we fund in the democracy area we always have a very particular target group in mind and that is the so-called invisible third as we call it the fencers people who are very have a very ambivalent ambiguous relationship to democracy and we are particularly focusing on making an extra effort to reach this group which is a hard to reach a target group and we try to figure out who they are in detail and where we could meet them best and I think what the survey data tell us partly reinforcing what we already know but partly also with new force I would say is that we need to always take a very closer look at those ones on the very low end of the economic ladder the ones who are most marginalized self-identified minority minority groups and women I think these three groups and then also a lot of intersectional effects thereof these are good pointers for us to know even better who we need to address and then in a lot of cases when we talked about the data ahead of time here the question was how can we reach the ones that are not the obvious people to participate in a survey in other words how do we reach those ones who are rarely asked I think for us this is a call to invest into going the extra mile talk to to communities that are rarely engaged to make an effort to find out how to reach them best and to to meet them where they already are and not put a burden on them to engage with sort of our own research again agenda so in that sense I think the data that Sima presented are for us even though Germany was not in the data set it's a very valuable tool to understand a the differences between different democracies but also to see how how the data could be used for example in civil society organizations several of them don't have the resources to do research of their own to go back to this survey and to to argue their cause by the findings that you've presented here so I think this for the everyday democracy work this is a very valuable tool thank you and here Massimo actions well I I think maybe two main things or takeaways one is that we don't need the same data but we need the disaggregated data and we need also good analysis and this is about combining expert assessments and popular assessments but also looking at the why there are gaps also between popular assessments and the perceptions of the most marginalized people and the second thing is that marginalization needs to be understood in its complexity because there are multiple dimensions of marginalization at play some of these marginalized respondents actually provided themselves a set for assessment as a marginalized individual in a community that could belong to more than one of these communities could be young women they could be in a minority group so really we need to be smarter and better at understanding the why of marginalization and it is clear that we haven't yet found the right responses in order to address these structural issues that match in the last week thank you thank you colleagues for the reflections I'll hand over to my colleague Sima for any questions that might be coming from our audience thank you uh in the audience if you do have questions please feel free to post them in the chat I've seen one which is did you follow any criteria to select the countries included in the survey how did you go about selecting them we had a number of criteria that we used first we wanted to cover the regions that international idea works in across the globe second we wanted countries that had a mix of some countries with lots of diversity in their population other countries with more homogenous populations we were also looking for countries that had differing levels of wealth and differing levels of democratization so some places have weaker institutions some places have stronger institutions and then we also wanted we made a very special effort to include countries that are normally not included in these kinds of global surveys for example the Solomon Islands which was one of reaching respondents in the Solomon Islands was very challenging um so that's generally how we chose the countries uh another question is does your data suggest that there is a significant difference between old and new democracies in terms of satisfaction more specifically is satisfaction higher in countries where citizens have experienced authoritarian regimes in their lifetime um no not necessarily we saw a mix of responses in terms of this question we actually expected to find that countries with longer histories of democracies would have you know more satisfaction and also that there would be less opening to those kinds of authoritarian leaning leaders but that is not what we found um okay any other questions how do you account for potential desirability bias from respondents in the survey particularly with concerns of rising limited freedom of expression that's a great question we had concerns about bias in all kinds of ways for example maybe minorities wouldn't have felt free to honestly say what their experiences were um in the survey so of course there's only so much we can do about that we're also constrained by the fact that you know we we couldn't reach all the marginalized communities we wanted to reach because it's um it's very cost intensive to try and go out to people face to face in some situations even a telephone survey won't work so we were limited in that way um we can't we we did as much as we could control for everything but this is like I said at the beginning just a first step in this exercise we hope to produce a lot more analysis but we also hope to produce more iterations of the survey in different countries into the future um the next question is given the findings are there other questions or different questions you would have asked yeah I was about to ask you yes or different ways you would disaggregate the data so we do actually have it disaggregated in ways that are not published in this first report for example we have um age disaggregated data that we haven't yet published we also have detailed data on what actually who the people that self identified as minorities are what's your racial identity what's your ethnic identity um you know who did you vote for partisan bias also we have all that data we just didn't publish everything in this first round but one of the things that came up was that in some cases it's really hard to compare the expert question to the public question we had to modify the question a little bit in some cases to make it a little bit easier to work with especially because we were translating also into different languages so I think in the next iteration we will take the lessons learned from some of those challenges and hopefully make it better um what were the methodologies used for each country so we have a an appendix in the report that tells you which uh countries used online panels and which countries use telephone surveys we wanted to do face-to-face surveys but in this round we were not able to do that so it was either an online panel or a telephone survey and then the final question do you have any views on the role of mainstream media in building perceptions favorable to ruling dispensations in the countries you surveyed these perceptions could be quite contrary to the actual state of democracy and freedom in these countries especially for minority groups Kevin I hear you do you want to say anything? no no no but I guess I remember when you share the results with me first that was one of my questions you know that very often the perceptions that people have about the workings of democracy in their own country are not necessarily aligned with their experience they are they're other intervening factors and the most obvious one I can think of is the role of of the media so I don't know see my if you have thought about it I mean it goes without saying that people's perceptions are built based on lots of different things not just media but what are your colleagues at work saying to you or what are your friends saying how does your family feel did you hear a story from your mom about trying to access the courts and that influences your perception even though you yourself didn't experience that so I think if we had more resources and more time we would dig deep to find out the drivers of some of this and in fact some of our future plans involve doing individual case studies to do that work of digging deeper to find out what drives people's perceptions because we could only ask so many questions in this round but I think media is one of the most important influences and in fact we had a discussion earlier today with some stakeholders to discuss the findings of the report and the importance of media literacy actually came out quite strongly and it's one of the things we've been thinking about also because you know how does disinformation especially that disinformation that's being pedaled by high level leaders influence people's perceptions how much is that shaping what people think okay if you and you know if you allow me to say something else the I mean you you have here on the one hand the the levels of satisfaction that are detected in the survey but then you have the levels of trust in institutions you know in elections in courts and so on I think the you know digging deeper into the determinants of trust is truly of the of the essence I mean we all know that generally speaking you know trust is in short supply right whichever way we look and yet we know rather little about what drives that and here you know one of the really interesting things that I've seen lately is the the work that OECD in particular has been doing around questions of trust and if I recall correctly and you know our OECD friends a will probably correct me if I don't report this in the right way but I understand that one of the things that is coming out very strongly you know in their in their data and in their research is the crucial role of the quality of OECD service in determining the experience of people with with I mean because ultimately people experience democracy and institutions in very concrete way right you know when they have to deal with with the police when they have to deal with schools right so I guess this is just the way of saying that you know digging deeper into the determinants of trust is a I think is truly important if we care about the state of democracy Sima yes I can just do that on that point about digging deeper was which Kevin is mentioning in terms of trust but I also want to reinforce a point that Massimo mentioned which connects with that and also I'll share about disaggregated when we dig deeper who are you reaching out to to get those perceptions and views and I think even in the earlier workshop that we were having about who is informing you know the perceptions that we are working with it's something that we grapple with as well right should not just be academics it should not be someone even put a sticker that the usual suspects yes we tend to go to the usual suspects and we leave out you know the ones on the ground we leave it in a day to day basis so our digging deeper means also to have that disaggregation so that we have that diversity to mirror the different segments of the populations in different countries and societies absolutely I hope that's one of the things that's come out most clearly to everyone who reads the report is that having this data disaggregated by social group sheds a light on a gap that isn't talked about much in mainstream democracy assessment and which I think deserves a lot more attention so we have three minutes left I'm just going to thank you so much for attending and giving us your time thank you to Antia and to Massimo for being on the panel to Kevin for taking the time for you know barging into the party and to Rumbi for moderating such a wonderful discussion thank you so much I'm just going to leave you with some food for thought I liked Kevin's phrase earlier of unwritten assumptions so there is the one about the fact that you know everything we've been doing in societies around the world we would hope would guarantee that our children would have it better off than we do and if that's not something we can count on anymore then what do what does that mean or the legitimacy of the democratic model but also that there were also other unwritten assumptions about the fact that you know elections are the cornerstone of democracy we are in a super cycle year of elections if people don't trust elections as a legitimate process that could catalyze kind of a domino effect in terms of trust in other institutions which rely on elected leaders so that I think is something to think about also and then finally one thing we didn't touch on here was that as people in the chat have pointed out you know can you explain why the results in country X look this way that doesn't seem right to me and that's the whole point of the study is that yeah it doesn't seem right it's really surprising but there's really important peer to peer learning opportunities there from countries that are doing well in some things and not so well in other things and countries that might surprise you and so we hope that those peer to peer conversations can happen thank you very much again and please do be in touch if you'd like to talk more thank you thank you thank you thank you