Measuring meanings of democracy—methods of differentiation

Abstract

The question of the contested nature of the concept of democracy is neither in doubt within the political science debate, nor new. What is new, however, is the attention paid to the knowledge of competing ideas of democracy in literature. The development of concepts of the “D-word” beyond Eurocentric hegemony was accompanied by a critical review of methodological approaches. Against the background of these methodological challenges, the requirements for more differentiated or mixed methodological approaches are discussed in the literature. In this article, a combined approach of the repertory grid and the semantic differential methods is proposed to enrich the innovative methodological dynamics of investigating the meaning of democracy. The article gives an introduction to the repertory grid method and illustrates, with a case study, how the Singaporean middle-class views democracy. These repertory grid face-to-face interviews serve as a starting point for the creation of valid polarity profiles for the semantic differential method—a method which, like the repertory grid, is used to measure the connotative or affective meaning of objects, but in a quantitative design so that representativeness can be achieved. Through this approach, the constructivist approach of repertory grid is partly combined with positivistic survey research, and thus the approach is inductive with deductive research.

Innovating Empirical Research on Legitimacy: Repertory Grid Analysis

“…In order to achieve representativeness and thus generalizable results, it would also be a worthwhile option to transfer the results of the repertory grid studies to the semantic differential method, which would allow a larger number of interviews to be conducted in a next step, as it is a purely quantitative approach. The advantage of this multi-level design would be that the construct poles of the semantic differential are based on the respondent's own constructs of the repertory grid interview and thereby are bottom-up created instead of top-down defined (Osterberg-Kaufmann and Stadelmaier, 2020).…”

“…As in the current study on legitimacy perception of the EU, the developed set of elements, as the first step and basis of the repertory grid interview, consists of eight theoretical representations of the political institutions to be evaluated as legitimate, namely key national (German Bundestag, German Bundesrat, German Government, German Constitutional Court) and European (European Parliament, European Commission, European Court of Justice, European Central Bank) institutions as well as two additional, more general, elements as experts and the most legitimate rule to represent the normative standards of legitimacy (ideal) for the following study. These elements are compared to the normative standard of legitimacy (ideal) as well as to each other element of the interview (Osterberg-Kaufmann, 2019a,b;Osterberg-Kaufmann and Stadelmaier, 2020). The division of the elements into the national and the European level goes back to the specifics of the Constitution in the multi-level system of the Federal Republic of Germany and takes up aspects of governing in a multi-level system.…”

Conceptualizing Difference

“…The theoretical debate about the people's understanding of democracy has shifted significantly since then (Dallmayr 1997;Dallmayr et al 2009;Ercan and Gagnon 2014). In the wake of the partly contradictory results of the numerous large surveys of support for democracy that have been available since the 2000s, the empirical debate has also opened to the theoretical considerations that there are obviously not only different understandings but also different meanings of democracy worldwide (Braizat 2010;Bratton 2010;Chu and Huang 2010;Lu and Chu 2021;Osterberg-Kaufmann and Stadelmaier 2020;Osterberg-Kaufmann and Teo 2022;Shi and Lu 2010).…”

Perception of Democracy: A Scale Development Study

“…In the literature, there are studies aiming to determine the views of students, teachers, and principals on democracy (Arı et al, 2021;Cheung et al, 2020;Lieberkind, 2020;Osterberg-Kaufmann & Stadelmaier, 2020;Ökmen et al, 2020;Şahin & Kılıç, 2020a;Şahin & Kılıç, 2020b;Şahin & Kılıç, 2020c;Şahin & Kılıç, 2020d;Şahin et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2015), Human Rights, Citizenship and Democracy course (Akçeşme & Fidan, 2021;Durdi & Erdamar, 2020) and democratic school culture (Pažur et al, 2020;Yavuz Tabak & Karip, 2021) in various ways. In addition, there are scales of attitude towards democracy (Sarwar et al, 2010), attitude towards democracy (Toraman et al, 2015) and multicultural education, and organizational democracy perception (Geçkil & Tikici, 2015) in the literature.…”