One size fits it all? Citizens' conceptions of elites and democracy

This paper investigates citizens’ expectations towards the traits and behaviour of the elites in their countries, i.e. towards the leaders of its most influential institutions and organizations. These expectations are further correlated with the conceptions of democracy the same people hold. We assume a congruence between the demand for a certain type of elite and the normative idea how democracy should work. For instance, highly educated elites with a superior social status are more important in a trustee or even technocratic conception of representative democracy, while elites reflecting all educational degrees and social statuses within the population may fit better to a delegate or participatory conception of democracy. Citizens may be more capable in judging whether the traits and behaviour of concrete elites fulfil their demands than judging whether the entire institutional framework functions according to their expectations. Thus, we consider the expectation towards elites as the personnel of the democratic institutional framework as important dimension of democratic conceptions. In particular, the paper investigates representative, participatory, deliberative, technocratic and populist conceptions of democracy and a wide range of elites’ traits, thereby including not only expectations towards political but also economic and administrative elites. The analysis is based on a large scale population survey conducted in 2019 in Germany (N ~ 1800).