We and the People: Elites' Practical Theories of Democracy in Historical Comparison

The paper starts form the premise that political actors, and professional politicians in particular, have a clear conception of what they are doing and what the rules under which they are playing are. Taken together these conceptions should add up to something like a practical theory of democracy. Moreover, these theories can be expected to be shared by actors in the same polity during the same time (although competing theories are entirely possible). Therefore, I propose to take a closer look at the theories of democracy politicians hold and to compare prevailing practical theories internationally and over time. In this paper I will focus on a historical comparison of German politicians in the Weimar Republic and the current Federal Republic. The emphasis will be on historical continuity as much as on areas of fundamental change. As categories of comparison, I will emphasize the relational aspects of democracy, that is relations of representatives to citizens, to members of the same party, to political opponents, relations of the parliament to other institutions etc. Methodologically, the paper will make use of Members of Parliament’s autobiographies and parliamentary speeches. As the focus is on the shared understanding, I will include representatives of different political parties (but excluding, at least for the moment, anti-system parties). The analysis will be based on a relatively new qualitative technique called Collective Mindset Analysis (Deutungsmusteranalyse) developed in Germany by Carsten Ullrich (1999; for a presentation in English see Pohlmann et al. 2014).