The quality of democracy has become a major topic in the “macro” research agenda on democracy in recent years. However, unlike what has happened with previous research agendas on transition to and consolidation of democracy, the “micro” research has still not properly dealt with this new subject of study. This gap, however, is a serious limitation of the research on citizens’ democratic attitudes: either because it lacks the appropriate indicators or because its approach has not been successful, the truth is that this literature has hardly helped us to understand how citizens evaluate the actual performance of their democracies and to what extent their expectations of the democratic system have been fulfilled or not. Under this premise, this paper expresses the need for a new research agenda in the field of political culture analysis that focuses on analyzing citizens’ views and opinions on the quality of their democratic system. The work will discuss the best way to measure citizens’ satisfaction with democratic quality, it will make a proposal of the proper indicators for its measurement, and will analyze currently existing indicators contained in two monographs surveys on Quality of Democracy, held in Portugal and Spain (both in 2009) and will compare them with traditional indicators on citizens’ democratic attitudes. The paper conclusions’ will try to demonstrate the best adequacy of the “new” indicators, as opposed to “traditional” ones, to measure citizens’ democratic attitudes and opinions, due to some problems of validity and formulation that traditional indicators present and that have rarely been taken into account by the literature.
