Connecting Political Talk and Survey Design: Developing a Mixed-Methods Approach to Researching Democratic Preferences

There is a burgeoning literature on citizens’ process preferences that is largely conducted through survey methods that derive their questions from normative models of democracy with the aim of understanding which model of democracy is preferred by citizens. This assumes that citizens think about democracy as political philosophers do, conceiving of it in a highly abstract and normative fashion; it reifies normative constructs as if they psychological phenomena. There has, however, been little research to explore whether citizens relate to political process in these terms, raising fundamental questions about the validity of these research instruments. This paper outlines an alternative approach. It sets out a mixed methods design that moves from political talk to survey design. It draws on a series of group interviews carried out in Germany and the UK in which participants are asked to discuss their preferences for different potential democratic reforms with their fellow citizens. The aim is to introduce an inductive element to researching democratic preferences that roots survey design in a more realistic account of how citizens appraise political processes. In addition, the approach is intended to ensure that surveys of process preferences are not purely determined by the preoccupations of the researcher and imposed upon participants, but informed by their perspectives, thus responding to calls to bring the demos into research on democracy.