Democracy Studies Annual Lecture 2026
Democracy for Real People
Professor of Political Theory and Public Policy
Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz
How can democratic institutions meet citizen expectations of equal voice and effective self-government without compromising the capacity to produce fair outcomes that citizens also expect? My new book, co-authored with Armin Schäfer, addresses this question by developing a citizen-focused, empirically grounded theory of democracy. We argue that understanding the current crisis of liberal democracy requires closer attention to how citizens relate to democracy, and where and why institutions fail to meet their expectations.
Positioning ourselves against both the recent wave of realist accounts and overly idealist approaches, we develop a framework oriented toward democracy for “real people,” which takes citizens’ expectations and evaluations seriously. To this end, we analyze how citizens in contemporary democracies understand and assess democratic governance. Drawing on survey and experimental evidence, we identify the forms of democracy they aspire to and the institutional designs they prefer.
Integrating these empirical insights with normative analysis and evidence on the outcome effects of institutional design, we propose equal deliberative responsiveness as a criterion for successful democratic representation and outline institutional innovations aimed at realizing this standard.
Moderated by Hannah Werner, University of Zurich