Paradigms of Democracy Research - Bring the people back to the heart of democracy research

The research problem that leads us to reflect on paradigms of democracy research is the discrepancy between the fundamental support for the idea of democracy and the dissatisfaction with the existing democracies. So, although the population's support for democracy is at a consistently high level, more and more people are dissatisfied with democracy. In our view, this primarily raises the question of which concepts of democracy are behind the evaluation of democracy and whether these concepts can be used to identify the reform potential of our current democracy. Our approach to this initial question is whether, the current democratic crisis is mainly due to the institutional state of the political system, that is institutions and processes, or whether the democratic crisis also has to do with the sensitivities, mentalities and attitudes of the population who are estranged from the democratic system. Democracy, in the form in which it is currently institutionalized, is perceived as dysfunctional in the face of rapid socio-economic change and various crisis. The discrepancy between the population's understanding of democracy and the current state of democracy only becomes clear when the attitudes of the population are expressed in political behavior and can no longer be ignored as a rejection of (the liberal-procedural) democracy and its institutions and actors. If we want to discuss the crisis of democracy, we cannot avoid dealing with the reference models behind the (crisis) judgment. We argue, that this requires a permanent empirical, but also theoretical openness to how the understanding of democracy is changing, not only among democracy researchers themselves, but also among the population. In order to bring these developments to fruition in empirical democracy research, we need to think about how the inclusion of non-Western theories of democracy in empirical democracy research can work without stretching the idea of democracy to such an extent that it is no longer viable as a scientific concept. This development can be achieved by moving away from a purely institutional view of democracy and focusing on the basic principles of democracy. This shift in perspective can make the essence of democracy more visible, regardless of its spatial or temporal location, and at the same time enables the inclusion of non-Western knowledge in the Western canon of ideas. It also makes it possible to work comparatively and empirically and to examine how these principles are realized or restricted by means of different institutional arrangements in reality in globally different contexts and can pave the way for truly comparative empirical democracy research. Therefore, we will argue in this paper for an opening up of the current paradigm of democracy, which consists of stepping back behind the institutions of democracy and asking what purpose they serve. What is the basic principle of all democracies, regardless of their type and form? Further we will briefly introduce a conceptual approach, which will give an idea how this step could be possible.