This project is situated at the interface between normative political theory and comparative study of democracy. It aims at a more sophisticated understanding of how political equality, a core ideal of democracy, is realized within new forms of participation (“democratic innovations”). In doing so, we start from the assumption that democratic innovations may increase the existing participatory selectivity in representative democracies and therefore jeopardize the realization of the ideal of political equality.
Empirically, the project focuses on innovative forms of participation in German federal states and municipalities. Unlike the mainstream of the extant literature that explores citizen attitudes towards and use of democratic innovations, our project concentrates on the systematic reconstruction and analysis of relevant political discourses in various contexts.
More concretely, the discourse analyses will cover all respective judgments of constitutional courts, parliamentary debates as well as selected national newspapers in long-term perspective. To analyze these extensive corpora in full-text length, we will employ advanced tools of quantitative text-mining. Generating novel insights in theoretical, methodological and empirical terms, the results of the project should provide a substantial basis for a grant application with the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Principal Investigators: Prof. Dr. Florian Grotz; Prof. Dr. Gary S. Schaal (HSU Hamburg).
Research Fellows: Fränze Wilhelm M.A.; Christoph Deppe M.A.
Funding Agency: Internal Research Advancement Grant (IFF) of HSU Hamburg.
Funding Period: 01.07.2017-30.06.2019.
Letzte Änderung: 6. February 2018