Citizens’ Conceptions of Democracy and Political Participation in Germany

A large body of literature discusses the disaffection of citizens with representative democracy. The existence of several important problems in the process of political representation led to a gradual abandon of the traditional modes of political involvement. As a result, over the last three decades electoral turnout has been in decline, party membership shrank, and the amount of loyal voters decreased in many contemporary democracies. Earlier research argued that the adoption of alternative forms of democracy that may bring the citizen back in (Scarrow, 2001; Zittel & Fuchs, 2007; Geissel & Newton, 2012). At the same time, studies revealed that citizens’ preferences are not uniform and people have different conceptions regarding the functioning of a democracy (Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 2001; Font & Alarcon, 2011; Bengtsson, 2012). However, little attention has been paid to the connection between citizens’ preferences for democratic alternatives and their desire to get involved in new democratic procedures. To fill this gap, our paper aims to investigate how preferences of German citizens for another type of democracy influence their involvement in politics and decision-making. Our statistical analysis tests the effects produced by the preferences for conceptions of democracy on types of political participation (voting, use of referendums, deliberations etc.). It draws on data from a survey conducted in autumn 2014 on a probability representative sample at national level.