Studying meanings of democracy empirically – The multivocality of the term "democracy"

Abstract

The antennas of political science are fine-tuned for liberal democracy and therefore they can have a harder time understanding other ways in which the concept "democracy" is used. Within empirical democracy research, liberal concepts of democracy continue to dominate (Wolff 2022). For instance, the IR-scholar Milja Kurki argues that "democracy promotion scholars and practitioners do not adequately acknowledge or tackle the notion that democracy is an essentially contested concept" and that there is a "conceptually impoverished appreciation of the multiple meanings that the idea of democracy can take" (Kurki 2010). The focus on liberal notions of democracy blocks the view for its empirical manifestations outside liberal societies as well as its non- and anti-liberal manifestations within liberal societies. As such, the current global rise of authoritarian governments which have largely emerged from within liberal constitutional democracies, captured in phrases like "democratic backsliding" (Bermeo 2016), are uniquely seen as a 21st century challenge. Authoritarian democracies in contemporary times have used democracy’s resources itself, such as elections and existing laws, to transform democratic regimes from within, yielding political systems that are "ambiguously democratic or hybrid" (Bermeo 2016). In several parts of the world today "democracy and authoritarian populism, liberalism and illiberalism exist in uneasy simultaneity" (Hansen and Roy 2022). In order to understand this crisis of and in democracy, a deeper engagement with the concept and practice of democracy requires both a conceptual and theoretical engagement with democracy – its varied iterations such as electoral, representative, deliberative etc. – from the so-called global south, as well as an attention to alternative democratic practices both inside and outside western liberal societies. Outside the disciplinary mainstream of democracy studies and their prioritisation of comparability over context, there are several empirical studies of the meanings of democracy that dig deep into local uses of the term "democracy" and seek to understand how meanings change according to different situations of use and over time. Some of these studies use surveys (e.g. Lu and Shi 2014), others use interviews (e.g. Hu 2018), focus group discussions, and ethnographic methods (e.g. Shaffer, 1998). In this panel, we want to explore examples of such studies and reflect on their methods and their relationship to democracy studies. We are especially interested in papers that combine empirical work and area-specific knowledge with broader themes in political theory, such as democracy’s relationship to nation and nationalism, populism, civil society, religion etc. as well as and in papers that reflect on their methodology.

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