People-Centered or Institutional Democrats? A Study of US and German Legislators

• In Event: Conceptions of Democracy among German and American Citizens and Political Elites

Abstract

For our paper’s abstract, I’ve edited it slightly below– if the changes work for you all as well, please feel free to add it to the proposal as follows:
In their 2002 book “Stealth Democracy”, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse argue that there is a mismatch of process preferences of citizens and political elites. Whereas citizens showed a normal distribution of preferences ranging from direct democracy to institutional democracy, political elites are perceived to lean strongly towards institutional democracy. While this may have been true in the United States in 1998, recent developments such as the rise of populism and increased polarization in the United States and Europe suggest a different trend, as politicians themselves seem to be losing trust in institutions. This paper aims to explore the distribution of preferences of legislators in the process space today based on novel data from the United States and Germany, enabling us to update our understanding of democratic process preferences in the US and to examine these preferences in a comparative perspective. We introduce a new, comprehensive index, constructed from several survey questions, which measures process preferences on a continuum ranging from people-centered to institutional democracy. Our findings demonstrate that legislators in Germany indeed show a normal preference distribution, while legislators in the more polarized United States lean towards people-centered process preferences. We consider the implications of these preferences for the quality of democracy and functioning of these two governments.

Authors

• Melody Crowder-Meyer, Davidson College

• Leonard Häfner, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz

• Claudia Landwehr, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

• Lea Stallbaum, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz