Jason Mast, Ph.D.

/ Democratic Futures: A Comparative Analysis of Democratic Cultural Codes in the U.S. and Germany

Recently, western democracies have been wracked by unanticipated swells of populism, ethnonationalism, and isolationism, all of which have greatly unsettled the neoliberal, globalist, and multicultural trajectories many assumed were durable and determined. The shock produced by events like Donald Trump’s two victories in U.S. presidential elections and the successes of the Alternative for Deutschland’s (AfD) in Germany – as well as the electoral successes of parties such as UKIP or Reform UK, the Sweden Democrats, the Party of Freedom in the Netherlands, the National Rally in France, the Brothers of Italy, and Vox in Spain – indicate that taken for granted cultural assumptions about democracy are not only being called into question but upended. We interpret these developments theoretically as representing severe challenges to the fundamental cultural elements that control, anchor, and organize liberal, western democratic social orders. Titled Democratic Futures, in this research project, we are examining the scope and intensity of these challenges in two nations, namely, in the U.S. and Germany.

An evolving body of literature on these and similar events has been characterizing contemporary western democratic publics as wracked by forces of fragmentation, as deeply polarized, and as increasingly prone to embracing a politics of rupture and irrationality. In Democratic Futures, we are examining how and to what extent these forces are placing the American and German democratic normative orders under great strain. In the U.S. case, we are focusing on the campaigns staged during the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. In the German case, we are looking at how these forces influenced the 2025 federal election.

Through this research we seek to assemble an innovative mixed methods design. We are using the qualitative method of structural hermeneutics to examine manifestations of durability and strain in both of the research sites. Additionally, for each empirical case, we are conducting a computational hermeneutic analysis, or an assemblage of methods afforded by large language models and AI platforms, which combine to enable us to analyze a large and ever-expanding online universe of text corpora consisting of newspaper archives, television transcripts, Twitter (X) comments, political blogs, and political speeches, for instance. Through this effort, we aim to design a mixed methods approach that will accentuate these methods’ strengths while minimizing the effects of their weaknesses.