German Legislators’ Conceptions of Democracy and Process Preferences: Results from a New Survey

ABSTRACTDemocracy’s resilience arguably depends on political elites’ loyalty to the political system. How do elected representatives understand democracy and their own role in it? We present results of a survey conducted among German legislators in state parliaments and the Bundestag in 2022. We start by mapping the scope and content of consensus and dissent where principles of democracy and their institutionalisation are concerned and go on to hypothesise that congruence between one’s own conceptions of democracy and established institutions and practices is generally higher among established and government parties’ representatives but also dependent on ideological inclinations. Our results are overall reassuring, showing a relatively low level of polarisation in attitudes to democracy, and have implications for the study of political elites, for diagnoses of political polarisation in Germany and for the possibility and feasibility of institutional reform. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThe authors thank Miriam Gill and Paul Weingärtner for excellent research assistance and Sven Hillen as well as two anonymous reviewers for German Politics for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENTThe data that support the findings of this study are openly available in: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/GUVA5P.DISCLOSURE STATEMENTNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).SUPPLEMENTAL DATA AND RESEARCH MATERIALSSupplemental data for this article can be accessed on the Taylor & Francis website, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2023.2279183DATA AVAILABILITY AND DEPOSITIONReplication files will be made available on the authors’ website.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the DFG [grant number LA 2388/9-1].Notes on contributorsLeonard HäfnerLeonard Häfner is doctoral researcher in the DFG-funded project ‘Conceptions of Democracy among Political Elites and Citizens’ at JGU Mainz.Claudia Landwehr has been professor of political theory and public policy at JGU Mainz since 2011. She works on deliberative theories of democracy and political representation and studies citizen and elite conceptions of democracy and process preferences. She has recently published ‘Contested Representation. Challenges, Shortcomings and Reforms’ (Cambridge University Press 2022, edited with Thomas Saalfeld and Armin Schäfer).Claudia LandwehrLea Stallbaum is doctoral researcher in the DFG-funded project ‘Conceptions of Democracy among Political Elites and Citizens’ at JGU Mainz.