Challenges in conceptualizing and measuring meanings and understandings of democracy

Norma Osterberg-Kaufmann,Christoph Mohamad-Klotzbach,Toralf Stark

doi:10.1007/s12286-020-00470-5

Abstract

Research on meanings and understandings of democracy is growing. But besides useful theoretical and empirical insights, this research produces open questions concerning the conceptualization and the measurement of meanings of democracy. This special section—and especially this introductory paper and the different contributions—reflect on several key challenges and thereby go beyond the debate about advantages and disadvantages of open and closed questions measuring meanings of democracy in surveys. Both conceptualization and measurement have different challenges which researchers should take into account when developing research designs, specifically by doing cross-cultural comparisons. Other challenges are connected to the debate on universalism versus relativism and the usage of various terms, which are often not clearly defined. This paper offers an analytical framework to distinguish between meanings and understandings of democracy, thereby integrating comparative political theory and empirical democracy research through inductive and deductive approaches. And it gives an overview of the contributions of this special section. In sum, research on meanings and understandings of democracy is needed to gain a better picture of political cultures around the world.

Highlights

Research on the meanings and understandings of democracy has recently become more and more important in two specific fields
In the context of political culture research, it moves beyond the classical cognitive interest in political cultural research in the tradition of Almond and Verba (1963) and Easton (1975), which almost exclusively asks for the support of democratic values and political objects by the population (e.g. Norris 1999, 2011; Braizat 2010; Bratton 2010; Diamond 2010; Chu and Huang 2010; Shi and Lu 2010; Weßels 2015; Schubert and Weiß 2016a; Ferrín and Kriesi 2016; Mohamad-Klotzbach and Schlenkrich 2016; Pickel 2017; Ulbricht 2018)
We find meanings and understandings of democracy in central debates of democracy research, especially the “quality of democracy”-debate (Lauth 2004; Munck 2009, 2016; Coppedge et al 2011; Pickel and Pickel 2012; Pickel et al 2015, 2016), the crisis diagnoses of democracy (e.g. Keane 2009; Ercan and Gagnon 2014; Schaal 2016; Merkel and Kneip 2018), the legitimacy of democracies (Kriesi 2013, Celikates et al 2015), their frontiers (Förster and Lemke 2017) and democratic innovations (Smith 2009; Newton and Geissel 2012)

Summary

Introduction

Research on the meanings and understandings of democracy has recently become more and more important in two specific fields. The empirical analysis and interpretation of the results arising from the various approaches in the field of democracy and political culture research depend on three decisive key criteria: conceptualization, operationalization, and methodological approaches. These three aspects produce certain challenges: Challenges of conceptualization At the core of these challenges lies the consideration of what is generally (public) and (experts) associated with the concept of democracy. These considerations are complemented by findings from a somewhat newer field of research that deals with the problem of dealing with cultural and linguistic equivalence (van de Vijver 2003; van Deth 2013; Schaffer 2014)

The universalism–relativism debate

Some thoughts on terms in the field

Key question

Objective

Perspective

Contributions of the special section