Studying the Demand Side of the Democratic Deficit: The Problem and an Exploratory Study Design

What do American citizens expect of democracy? How do they think democracy should operate and what, ultimately, do they understand democracy to be? Remarkably, few political scientists have pursued this line of questioning directly (though see Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002). Nevertheless, answers to those questions are increasingly critical to an assessment of the health of American democracy. The gap between citizens’ democratic aspirations and their evaluations of the performance of their political systems – what Pippa Norris (2011) calls the “democratic deficit” – has grown in the last several decades. While the public’s evaluation of the system’s performance (i.e., the “supply side” of the deficit) has been well documented, we know far less about the citizenry’s democratic aspirations (i.e., the “demand side”). This paper will address these matters in three ways. First, it will explore the conceptual difficulty confronting scholars who are interested in empirical examinations of the demand side of the democratic deficit. The problem, at root, is that the core concept in question – democracy – is abstract and multidimensional, making it difficult to access citizens’ preferences in any meaningful way. Second, the paper will provide a categorization of the various elements of democratic forms of government (e.g., principles and institutions) and will identify the elements within each category. Such a categorization will enable researchers to pose discrete alternatives to citizens, who can then more easily express their preferences and priorities. Third, the paper will offer detailed suggestions for exploratory studies of citizens’ democratic aspirations. Focus groups and the use of Q-methodology will be discussed. In addition to recommended focus group questions, this section will also provide a set of statements to be Q-sorted by participants. The elements of democracy that participants will be asked to sort will be taken from the identification of essential democratic elements in the preceding section.