Political Process Preferences in Europe: Rethinking Conceptual, Ontological and Methodological Foundations

To understand the levels of dissatisfaction with democratic performance in Europe, as well as the most effective reforms for addressing it, requires an understanding of citizens’ process preferences: how do they want democracies to function? Empirical research on process preferences is rapidly proliferating, but it has been underpinned by an assumption that the task of this research is to discover which one of a set of abstract, normative models of democracy citizens subscribe to. The driving idea behind PoPPiE is that this assumption is a serious limitation. It has led the study of process preferences to focus on discrete choices between simple alternatives that fail to represent the real choices facing the inhabitants of complex democratic systems and neglected the extent to which individuals are conflicted between competing democratic norms. It prevents robust inferences on important questions, such as levels of polarisation and support for democratic innovations.PoPPiE develops a groundbreaking new approach to rethink the conceptual, ontological and methodological foundations for researching political process preferences. - First, by applying democratic systems theory to re-conceptualise the content of process preferences it will generate a wholly new conceptual understanding of preferences for complex democratic systems, rather than ideal models of democracy. - Second, instead of assuming that the nature of process preferences is inherently ideological, PoPPiE uses a novel multidimensional theoretical framework to assess levels of contextuality, conditionality and coherence in process preferences. - Third, it develops a new mixed methods approach, producing a unique dataset that combines qualitative and quantitative data on a single individual’s preference.The new approach will not only strengthen the foundations of the science of process preferences, but ensure its findings are more policy relevant for the project of renewing European democracies.