Deconstructing Understandings of Democracy

• In Event: Political Knowledge, Civic Competence, and Democracy

Abstract

Democracy means different things to different people. And while support for and understandings of democracy is measured recently in a more granular way, respondent ratings of elements of democracy remain biased to the top-end of the scale. Moreover, while research shows that citizens are often ambivalent towards democracy, standard survey items and their aggregation assume citizens are coherent and consistent, and their latent understandings generalizable and transitive.
This paper introduces ‘democratic preference chains’ to further this debate conceptually and methodologically. Democratic preference chains are the order in which individual respondents think specific elements are most important in a democratic system. Each respondent (n = 9.000) repeatedly (5 to 10 ‘games’ per respondent, for a total of 60.000 observations) chooses a ‘winner’ out of two fully randomized elements. From this, short preference chains (A > B; B > C; C > A) are constructed to analyse latent classes of contextual and empirically valid understandings of democracy.
The implications of this are threefold. First, democratic preference chains show that, even within the academic classes of liberal, electoral, or populist democrats, there is large heterogeneity among citizens; not only about which elements of democracy are supported, but also about what democracy actually means. Second, longer preference chains (A > B > C > A) show how citizens can be inconsistent in their understandings of democracy while still being committed to it. Third, democratic preference chains show how ill-willing actors can leverage support for specific elements of democracy to undermine others – while appearing to support democracy.

Author

• Joep van Lit, Radboud University Nijmegen