Varieties of Understandings of Democracy – Comparing Differences Within and Across Nations

When analyzing political, scientific and societal discourses on democracy, the striking finding is the absence of a consensus about what democracy actually is. Consequently, the conceptualization of democracy, which defines the features constituting democracy is highly contested and falls apart among the lines of intension and extension (Sartori). Since the research strand on the measurement of the quality of democracy took off, this institutional perspective dominates the research on meanings of democracy. For example, the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem) arranges divergent principles of democracy, such as liberal, egalitarian or deliberative democracy, around the core element of elections. From this point of departure, we collect further deductive meanings of democracy among scholars and compare them with real world understandings of democracy among citizens. Hence, we ask if academic conceptualizations and popular understandings are congruent. To put it in other words, are these deductive concepts empirically evident? Unlike existing studies, we leave the high-level aggregate dimensions and itemize the understandings of democracy corresponding to concept building strategies. This enables us to identify nuanced understandings of democracy, which may be re-aggregated into broad and more abstract understandings of democracy in the end. This is necessary, since we are interested in the proliferation of different understandings among members of a nation and the differences of understandings across nations in a global perspective. Do we find understandings of democracy in a society to be rather homogenous, centered around concurrent poles or are they highly dispersed? Do understandings of democracy cluster in either geographic or cultural zones, or can we observe a convergence of dominant understandings? The plan of the paper starts with a collection of meanings of democracy and a comparison of their attributes by the use of the procedure of explication. On this basis, we operationalize and measure these meanings via data of the World Value Survey and European Value Survey. To inspect the associations between understandings in an individual perspective and to assess the proliferation of their relative importance in a nationwide perspective, we compare the application of two classification approaches (configurational and cluster analysis). Then we present empirical findings on the varieties of understandings of democracy and their differences within and across nations.