Challenges in conceptualizing and measuring meanings and understandings of democracy

Research on meanings and understandings of democracy is growing. But besides useful theoretical and empirical insights, this research produces open questions concerning the conceptualization and the measurement of meanings of democracy. This special section-and especially this introductory paper and the different contributions-reflect on several key challenges and thereby go beyond the debate about advantages and disadvantages of open and closed questions measuring meanings of democracy in surveys. Both conceptualization and measurement have different challenges which researchers should take into account when developing research designs, specifically by doing cross-cultural comparisons. Other challenges are connected to the debate on universalism versus relativism and the usage of various terms, which are often not clearly defined. This paper offers an analytical framework to distinguish between meanings and understandings of democracy, thereby integrating comparative political theory and empirical democracy research through inductive and deductive approaches. And it gives an overview of the contributions of this special section. In sum, research on meanings and understandings of democracy is needed to gain a better picture of political cultures around the world.