INTRODUCTION: WORLD OPINION SURVEYS AND THE WAR IN IRAQ.

Long gone are the days when the survey research community might have heeded scholar Alasdair Maclntyre's warning, in an essay on whether a science of comparative politics was possible, about the difficulties of `comparing attitudes independently of institutions and practices'; of the dangers, for example, of assuming that when one asks Italian, German, and English respondents to say nothing of Algerian, Jordanian, and Russian respondents about the pride they take in their governments, the concept of `pride' is one for which there is a shared, cross-cultural, understanding. Before the war in Iraq and after the fall of the regime, news media and polling organizations in North America, Britain, and Europe coordinated public opinion surveys on the war and related issues across various parts of the globe North and South, East and West though with a heavy bias towards the 39 `older democracies' and an even heavier bias away from the 62 `non-democracies', the number of countries chosen from the 43 newer democracies and 47 semidemocracies' falling somewhere in between.