The essential characteristics of democracy...

The essential characteristics of democracy…


Working title: Democracy's Meanings: How Citizens Think About and Evaluate Democracy
Publisher's proposal: working draft, 9/4/18
 

The folk theory of democracy, popular among pundits and elites, conveys that democratic values, beliefs, and priorities have remained more or less constant over time. This is patently wrong. Democracies operate in an ongoing state of existential crisis over who participates, when such participation occurs, and what sorts of material obligations the state owes to ordinary citizens. This is a book about how the public thinks about the meaning of democracy and why it matters. Democracy’s Meanings promises to fill the gap between process-based democratic theory – the idea that democracy is best understood in terms of its institutional qualities – and how ordinary citizens conceptualize democracy with respect to their social, economic, and political experiences. In turn, we challenge prevailing narratives regarding how Americans grade democracy. While the crisis-of-democracy literature implies that citizens have become disillusioned with democracy, we show why these conclusions are deeply flawed. While the mass public remains largely committed to important democratic values, there are important disagreements among citizens regarding the design of democracy as it relates to equal treatment and the distribution of material goods.