Citizens’ opinions and imaginations are crucial when it comes to designing democracy in the 21st century. Bottom-up understandings of democracy may not only help to democratize democratic theory (Asenbaum 2021), they may also be essential for robust anticipation of policy-makers when they engage in democratic reforms. We employ a new approach to analyse citizen answers to the open survey question ‘People have different ideas about what it means for a society to be a democracy. In your own words, what does democracy mean to you?´ We focus on representative samples in the US and Germany and identify distinct topics by applying Structural Topic Modeling. At the same time, we link citizen responses to survey questions on democratic values and democratic designs (preferences for representative, direct-democratic or technocratic decision-making), exploring whether citizen imaginations have some coherence with values and designs.
