Predictably Paradoxical: Leveraging AI to Map the Democratic Mind

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Alexander Wuttke
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 563927303

This research project investigates the paradoxical attitudes citizens hold towards democracy: despite valuing democracy, citizens fail to stand up for democracy when under attack; despite living in highly democratic societies, citizens in Western countries rate their political system no higher than citizens in oppressive autocracies and people fail to distinguish between democratic and undemocratic regimes. Explaining how citizens' attitudes towards democracy are often paradoxical yet predictable is the goal of this project. Understanding people's predictably paradoxical attitudes on democracy is critical for explaining citizens' vulnerability to anti-democratic rhetoric and the inability to recognize democratic backsliding. Existing research on democratic attitudes is constrained by conceptual and methodological blind spots. Standardized surveys dominate the field, limiting respondents to pre-defined answers, and missing the complexity of people’s attitudes which should be understood as multi-dimensional concepts. Open-ended methods, while richer in depth, lack scalability and cross-national comparability. Moreover, current theories emphasize macro-level trends while neglecting individual-level inconsistencies in attitudes and behavior. This project introduces significant innovations to overcome these challenges. It employs AI-powered conversational interviews using Large Language Models to conduct semi-structured, in-depth discussions on democracy at scale. This method combines the scalability of surveys with the richness of qualitative interviews, enabling respondents to express their ideas on democracy in their own words. This allows exploring democratic belief systems beyond the anticipated, surface-level responses. The project will map citizens' mental representations of democracy, assess the strength and consistency of their belief systems, and compare lay perspectives with expert conceptions. Theoretically, the project examines how democratic attitudes are shaped by cognitive heuristics, tangible experiences, group-serving biases, and evolved predispositions toward negativity and ambiguity intolerance. The analysis will determine whether democratic attitudes are superficial or meaningful by mapping their internal consistency, breadth, and stability. The empirical findings will be contextualized globally, covering established and transitioning democracies, and supplemented by experimental tests of democratic resilience. Ultimately, this project seeks to illuminate the democratic mind, bridging gaps between citizen and expert conceptions of democracy. By leveraging cutting-edge AI methodologies and interdisciplinary theoretical insights, the project offers a theory of the democratic mind that aims to shed light on the cognitive roots of citizens' paradoxical attitudes towards democracy and their susceptibility to anti-democratic appeals in an era of democratic instability.

• DFG Programme: Emmy Noether Independent Junior Research Groups