New Frontiers in Democracy Research: Tackling a Conceptual and Methodological Impasse

Recent challenges to democracy from phenomena like populism and various crises have sparked renewed interest in citizens’ relationship to their democratic regimes. Rising dissatisfaction with democratic actors and doubts about the stability of democratic support have unveiled clear limitations of the established approaches to studying individuals’ attitudes towards democracy as an idea and as a realized institutional construct. Much of the existing research builds on a set of untested assumptions and is largely confined to conventional theoretical and methodological approaches. Crucially, scholarship is centered on political scientists’ conceptualizations of democracy, but it remains unclear to what extent citizens conform to such expectations or share the same understanding of democracy. In short, do people follow the conceptual templates of political science when hearing about democracy and democratic institutions? Likewise, while the literature proposes an abundance of functions and democratic behaviors for political parties, parliamentarians, parliaments, and governments, research rarely challenges these assumptions and explored how these are understood by citizens (Bengtsson/Wass 2011; Dassonneville et al. 2020; Werner 2019). Recent work on the interaction between radicalism and democratic attitudes has explored systematic patterns of how individuals with non-mainstream ideologies relate to democratic principles. Yet, available approaches are still confined by established theories of democratic practices and do not allow for previously un-theorized democratic alternatives to emerge. Another limitation of democracy research is the lack of attention paid to the resilience of democratic support when faced with a crisis or when significant political preferences are in conflict with such values. Since citizens connect democracy with performance and outputs (Shin/Kim 2018; Diamond/Morlino 2005), tradeoffs need to be better understood and more systematically theorized and explained. Aside from the failure of theorizing democratic alternatives, another limitation has been methodological. This, in particular, is linked to measuring support for democracy largely in an abstract manner (Carlin/Singer 2011; Inglehart 2003; Schedler/Sarsfield 2007), making it difficult to grasp the citizens’ ability to cognitively distinguish between democratic and autocratic characteristics (Cho 2014; 2015). This workshop aims to address these shortcomings and invites research proposals on democratic values and attitudes that are based on empirical scholarship but conceptually and/or methodologically innovative. We seek papers employing innovative theoretical, conceptual or methodological approaches to understanding (1) the (possible lack of) resilience of democratic support in the face of crises and perceived trade-offs with fundamental policy solutions, (2) individuals’ understanding of and expectations towards democracy, its institutions and actors as well as (3) the relationship between radical and democratic attitudes. Since the focus of this workshop is to push the boundaries of conventional political science research to better understand current developments in democracies, submissions are welcome that are based on empirical studies from all regions of the world, focusing on all levels of democracies (local to transnational), and employing both qualitative and quantitative methods.