Demokratiekonzeptionen von politischen Eliten und Bürgerinnen und Bürgern
- Gefördert von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
Leonard Häfner, Claudia Landwehr, Lea Stallbaum (v.l.n.r.) - Laufzeit: 2022-2025, 2025-2026
- Projektleiterin: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Claudia Landwehr
- Projektmitarbeitende: Leonard Häfner und Lea Stallbaum
Aktuelles
Unser Paper Institutional Design Preferences Among German and US Citizens: Results from a Factorial Survey Experiment, gemeinsame Arbeit mit unserem Projektpartner Christopher Ojeda (UC Merced), ist am 2. Januar 2025 online first bei Political Studies erschienen!
Über das Projekt
Over the last decade, concerns about the prospects of liberal democracy have intensified. With the rise of populist parties and candidates, democratic institutions have come to be attacked in the name of democracy itself. Apparently, different social groups and political parties mean different things when they call for more and better democracy. Our project “Conceptions of Democracy among Political Elites and Citizens” set out in 2022 to identify and understand competing normative conceptions of democracy in Germany and the United States. Arguing that any assessment of the state and resilience of democracy needs to be informed about what political actors mean by and expect from democracy, the project was based on the overarching assumption that conceptions of democracy evolve in reciprocal communicative processes between citizens and political elites. In order to trace results of these processes in citizen and elite attitudes as well as political communication, we conducted surveys among German and US citizens and legislators as well as a qualitative content analysis of party manifestos. In the second funding period, we will complement the project’s work packages with additional data and analyses: First, we will apply automated text analysis to analyze larger amounts of text and in particular, parliamentary debates over the course of 25 years. Second, we will conduct an additional conjoint experiment to further elucidate relationships between normative conceptions of democracy and institutional design preferences. Third, we will complement our survey of federal and state legislators with a survey of elected representatives in local politics in Germany and the United States.