Conceptualizing political order: Thoughts on the state-regime-nexus from a political culture perspective

Since the 1970s, there has been regular talk of a crisis of democracy within our discipline. Since the early 2000s, it has even been possible to speak of a more or less continuous crisis of democracy, triggered by terrorist attacks, wars, financial and economic crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, or climate change. These polycrises are not only a challenge for democracy, but also for the political order as a whole, i.e. also for the state. Within democracies, more and more political actors are emerging who not only question democracy, but also have very different understandings of the state. Examples can be found in politics (Javier Milei in Argentina) and various societal actors like the free city movement or various foundations and think tanks. However, a systematic assessment of these new ideas of political order has not yet been presented conceptually. The aim of this article is therefore to present an analytical framework from the perspective of political culture research that considers both the state and the regime as central components of political order. This conceptual framework expands the previous focus on the regime type (democracy vs. autocracy) and serves to examine the political ideas of political and civil society actors, as well as citizens, in a more structured way. At the same time, the proposed conceptualization can be validated through extensive empirical studies, both in qualitative and quantitative ways. On the basis of this expansion of political culture research, the causes of the variance in political ideas of order and the consequences of this variance can be analyzed in further steps.