Democracy, What’s in a Name? Citizens’ Definitions and Affective Responses to Democracy

Authors: Louise Knops (VUB), Maria-Jimena Sanhueza (ULB), Eline Severs (VUB), Kris Deschouwer (VUB) For the last couple of decades, scholars and observers alike have been describing the “crisis” of democracy. Some have denounced a “deficit” of democracy, while others have already announced its death by speaking of “post-democracy” (Crouch, 2004) or the reject of democracy all together (Monk, 2018). In this context, citizens are said to have become increasingly critical (Norris, 2011) towards representative democracy, but also, increasingly resentful. Our paper digs deeper into this debate. Our objective is twofold. First, we will examine what do citizens associate with the word democracy. Second, we will study if negative feelings, such as anger or resentment, are perceptible in these associations and whether or not they increase over time. To test this theoretical prediction, we propose to ask citizens an open question on the meaning of democracy and adopt a mixed-method inductive approach to analyze their responses. In particular, we conduct a comparative analysis of the meanings and ideas citizens associate with democracy in the Belgian context, in an attempt to find variations over time. By analysing the responses to the question “what does democracy mean to you” both in 2009 and 2019, we try to document both what citizens associate with democracy but also, crucially, how they say it, and whether changes can be observed over a 10-year timespan. To this end, we first develop an inductive coding scheme to apply to each set of responses (2009) and (2019). For each time-period, we map out thematic patterns and sociological variations, but also indicators for affective variations, here paying attention to the responses where an explicitly negative stance towards democracy is taken by the respondents. We then proceed with a comparison to highlight variations or stability in the dominant themes in 2009 and 2019 respectively, while observing if new themes emerged since 2009. Finally, within each category we look for affective variations between 2009 and 2019, here adopting a more in-depth qualitative approach that tends to the words and tones that emerge from the responses. With our paper, we hope to overcome a recurrent pitfall in political sciences where analytical and theoretical categorisations are often taken for granted. By front-staging the responses to a broad open question on the meaning of democracy, we hope to shed light on its alleged “crisis”, looked at from the citizens’ perspective.