Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy 29 One needs to properly situate the Philippine human condition under its system of governance to understand why an allegedly democratic regime has 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 final 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 undefined 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 first 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 (below) 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 May 2011—for over 27 years or a full generation where confirming survey data exists—Filipinos report worsening rather than improving QOLs virtually all the time. Yet most of the time they were "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 nearly three decades of documented public opinion.