Conceptualizing and Measuring Modern Democracy 27 failed to improve or at least arrest the deterioration of most Filipinos' quality of life. After going through the various statistical indices and the numerous learned, academic treatises analyzing the nation's political, economic and social conditions, there is one nal documentation that must be used in clarifying that the arguments for a democratic Philippines are unconvincing and must be abandoned. That is the Filipinos' own perception of their nation's history in the past decades and what happened to their families' quality of life under a regime that often is popularly described as being of, by and for the people, or, using categorical language, a democracy. In nationally representative surveys of Philippine public opinion like those of Pulse Asia and the Social Weather Stations, Filipinos are asked whether in the past 12 months their family's quality of life (QOL, left undened and unoperationalized by the survey designers so that the controlling sense is left entirely to those surveyed) had improved, remained the same or worsened. They are asked a follow-up question regarding what they anticipate it would be in the coming 12 months, whether their family's QOL would improve, remain the same or worsen. The rst question generates responses that make them either "gainers" or "losers" or "neither gainers nor losers" and therefore their QOL has remained basically unchanged. The second question allows for the respondents to be described as "optimists" or "pessimists" with those anticipating no change in QOL also comprising a third category. Netting the "gainers"-"losers" proportions and the "optimists"-"pessimists" proportions yield the QOL quadrants' measures in the charts below. Respondents then can be "gainers and optimistic," "gainers and pessimistic," "losers and pessimistic" or "losers and optimistic" in relation to their personally-assessed family QOLs. As Figure 1 (page 28) indicates, Filipinos have consistently kept faith with their government and its leaders, liberally trusting their presumed democratic system of governance and willfully optimistic about their future as a people. From April 1984 to July 2016 – for over 30 years or a full generation where conrming survey data exists-- Filipinos report worsening rather than improving QOLs nearly all the time. Yet most of the time when they acknowledge being "losers," they stubbornly clung to their optimism – the idea that their lives would make a turn for the better, that they would eventually be "gainers," a hope regularly sustained and also regularly quashed -- quarter after quarter, year after year. No political administration has changed this punishing pattern in three decades of documented public opinion In the past 30 years, only ve instances in well over a hundred are recorded of Filipinos reporting both QOL improvements and feeling optimistic for the coming year. The rst two instances were in May 1986 and again in March 1987 – both times with Corazon Aquino as newly-installed president. Marcos had just been put to ight in February 1986 and Filipinos were euphoric, gung-ho for what they believed the future would bring; in March 1987, their new, once