Established Intellectual Contestations in changing Social Contexts - How partisan dealignment patterns our stances towards Representative Democracy

Representative government always has been a much-contested issue in public and academic debates. The ideal of popular sovereignty is a key intellectual challenge in this regard. Through this lens, observers envision representative government as a sorry substitute for the real thing, i.e. unconstrained citizen participation and involvement in decision making. This intellectual challenge remained of little practical significance in 20th Century Western European democracies due to distinct social developments. The politization of social contexts by partisan identities and party organizations provided a useful vehicle to resolve the tensions between popular sovereignty, i.e. democracy, and representative government and to make representative democracy work. Recent social changes, however, have put partisan identities at stake and are thus well suited to disrupt this delicate balance between popular sovereignty and representative government. This paper explores main empirical implications of this argument at two levels of analysis. At the first level, it focuses on the citizen level and the relationship between partisan identities and stances towards representative democracy. Drawing from survey data collected in the context of the 2021 German Longitudinal Election Study, we ask how partisan identities– and the lack thereof – pattern citizen stances towards representative democracy and how this interacts with stances towards more advanced forms of participatory democracy. We suspect that challenges are particularly raised by non-partisans that subscribe to advanced forms of unconstrained democracy. At the second level, the paper focuses on the elite level to explore the extent to which party elites continue to support representative democracy and how we might explain variance in this regard. This step draws from the German Candidate Study 2021, which is part of the 2021 German Longitudinal Election Study. We suspect that skepticism towards representative democracy should be more pronounced among members of new anti-system parties, and especially among those who subscribe to more advanced forms of participatory democracy.