Although much remains to be learned regarding numerous aspects of politics and governance in Latin American democracies, gaps in our understanding are particularly glaring in the area of mass attitudes, and especially citizens’ attitudes toward democracy. Unlike in the United States and in other advanced industrial democracies, citizens of most developing nations have had neither extended experience with democratic political practices nor prolonged exposure to the sorts of information that foster consensus regarding the propriety and legitimacy of those practices. Consequently, we should not be surprised that the people of these nations vary in both their understanding of democracy and their commitment to the preservation of democratic institutions (Schaffer 1998). It is only quite recently that students of Latin American politics have begun to assess citizens’ conceptions of democracy. Thus, not surprisingly, much remains to be learned. Two recent projects provide evidence regarding both what is known about how people of the region view democracy and what remains to be discovered. The first is a project led by Roderic Camp (Camp 2001a) in which a team of scholars examined survey data from Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico. The second is the 2002 rendition of the Latinbarometro (Press Report 2002), which included a few important items regarding citizens’ views of democracy. Extant data are somewhat limited in what they reveal regarding conceptions of democracy in Latin America. The procedure on several surveys has been to ask respondents to summarize the meaning of democracy in a single word, and, likewise, to express what they expect from democracy in a single word. These approaches have two critical limitations. First, given the complexity of democracy as a concept, it is possible that these “top of the head” responses capture citizens’ views of democracy too coarsely. The single word most accessible to the respondent at a given moment may tell us something regarding the salience of particular aspects of democracy, but the necessary simplicity of responses means that little is learned as to the depth of opinion. A second, and related, point is that extant approaches inevitably depict the individual respondent’s view of democracy as being unidimensional. That is, the respondent who reduces democracy to “liberty” is presumed not to conceive of democracy in terms of electoral participation, whereas we would conclude that the respondent who answers “voting in elections” does not view protection of liberty as being central to democracy. The problem, of course, is that each of these respondents may well consider both liberty and voting in elections—and perhaps even a few other things as well—to be components of democracy. Survey procedures that permit only a single response option preclude identification of multiple dimensions of meaning. To fully understand the nature of citizens’ views of democracy, I contend that two factors must be considered: the components of those views and the manner in which those components are combined. Put differently, we need to understand both how and how complexly citizens conceive of democracy. To this aim, I conducted a series of focus groups in Costa Rica in the Summer of 2003. These focus groups were designed to identify, first, the various meanings participants attribute to democracy, and second, the complexity of these conceptions. Using Q-sort methodology, I seek to identify groupings of people based on their sorting of items measuring their attitudes toward various democratic values and principles. With this research technique, subjects of the focus groups are able to express the relative importance of various factors explaining their understanding of democracy, and to reveal combinations of political attitudes that most accurately describe such understanding. The technique also will reveal how subjects think that other individuals and social groups in Costa Rica perceive democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]