DFG Network: “Qualitative Studies of Public Opinion: Understanding the Crises of Democratic Politics”
Over the three years from 2026 to 2029, nineteen early-career researchers in political science, sociology and anthropology will come together biannually to discuss the renewal of a classical tradition of political research: qualitative studies of public opinion. Each meeting includes keynotes from international academic pioneers, trailblazers and rising stars in the field of qualitative political studies, in-depth discussions of ongoing research, as well as debates about methodological, conceptual and practical questions. For details see the project description below.
The network is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is organized by Anna Berg, Lena Röllicke and Linus Westheuser. The other participants are Manuela Beyer, Felix Butzlaff, Léonie de Jonge, Aletta Diefenbach, Alexander Harder, Till Hilmar, Nils Kumkar, Julia Leser, David Meiering, Gefjon Off, Philipp Rhein, Elgen Sauerborn, Andre Schmidt, Jasmin Siri, Paulus Wagner and Manès Weisskircher.
The kick-off meeting is held at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen on 3-4 July 2026. The second meeting takes place in Vienna at 14-15 January 2027. Interested guests are welcome and should contact the organizers.
Project Description
Introduction
The field of public opinion research today is widely perceived as synonymous with polling and survey statistics. “58 percent of citizens agree that…”, is the most common form public opinion takes in the minds of many, in and outside the academy. Although such statements are sometimes supplemented with soundbites from focus group research, or – in a few prominent but rare instances – by deep stories and typologies gleaned from political ethnographies and interview-based studies, the field of opinion research has largely narrowed to one method of data collection (surveys) and one mode of scientific reasoning (post-positivist quantitative analysis) (Pierson 2007; Igo 2007). This narrowing would have surprised the founders of public opinion research. Researchers like Paul Lazarsfeld, Marie Jahoda, Robert Merton, or Harold Lasswell, who established the scientific study of political attitudes and worldviews, understood and advocated for the integration of quantitative research with qualitative investigations; and many pioneered methods in both methodological strands. As Robert Merton remembers, Paul Lazarsfeld, who is today thought of as perhaps the founding father pioneer of quantitative opinion research,
“saw it as his ‘moral duty’ to demonstrate the value and […] necessity of combining quantitative inquiry with qualitative insight. More than once, as he confronted overly-zealous sociometricians persuaded that numbers are all, Paul could be heard intoning the monitory words of St. Augustine: ‘So it is, O Lord my God, I measure it and know not what it is I measure.’” (Merton 1979, 20)
The period in which the opinion survey revolutionized and professionalized political science and political sociology, was also a time of enormous creative development in qualitative research techniques. Newly developed content analyses of in-depth interviews flanked and informed studies of the national voting population (see e.g. Lazarsfeld et al. 1944); statements in polls were linked to citizens’ reasoning (Campbell 1945, Campbell et al. 1960); community studies based on participant observation explored intricate questions of political theory (Dahl 1961a, Park 1952) and it was often through insights from open-ended interviews that researchers theorized key mechanisms of political opinion formation (Berelson et al. 1954, Converse 1984). Furthermore, methods that today belong to the standard repertoire of qualitative social science research, such as focus groups and group discussions (Bohnsack 2004) were originally developed in and for research on opinion and opinion formation (e.g. Pollock and Adorno 2011[1955]) but have become less central to political studies today (but see e.g. Duchesne 2017, Rutjens et al. 2021, Kumkar 2018).
Outside commercial and applied research, these synergies were largely lost in the course of political science’s behavioral revolution of the 1950s and 1960s and the respective disciplinary siloing of political science, sociology, social psychology, and political anthropology (Archer 2010, Pierson 2007, Dahl 1961b). As a consequence, the academic landscape of public opinion research – both in Germany and internationally – today is heavily dominated by quant-only, survey-based studies, with qualitative research as an occasional add-on. Qualitative researchers working on political issues are dispersed across the disciplines and often find themselves lacking an independent forum where they could engage in paradigmatic debates, share cumulative insights, discuss methodological issues and challenges, or exchange best practices and standards of research. Our proposed network seeks to provide just such a forum. It will allow early-career researchers within the German-speaking research community to establish the field of qualitative public opinion research as a distinct field in its own right, map out this field’s potential, and define its future agenda in debate with one another and with leading international scholars.
We are encouraged in this endeavor by the wide resonance enjoyed in recent times by a number of what Katherine Cramer calls “ethnographies of public opinion”. Internationally, Cramer’s (2016) writings on “rural consciousness” in The Politics of Resentment, Arlie Hochschild’s (2016) reconstruction of Republican voters’ “deep stories” in Strangers in Their Own Land, and Justin Gest’s exploration of white workers’ political reasoning in The New Minority all were read and discussed by large audiences in and beyond the academy.Other famous examples include Benoît Coquard’s (2019) immersion into rural life in the Grand-Est region in France in Ceux qui restent, Didier Eribon’s (2013) biography Returning to Reims,or Rachel Sherman’s (2017) investigation of attitudes of the super-rich in Uneasy Street. In Germany, the book Triggerpunkte (Mau et al. 2023), co-authored by the main applicant of this network, became an unlikely bestseller widely praised for its extensive use of qualitative techniques for mapping the affective dynamics of political conflicts in contemporary Germany.
We believe that it is no coincidence that qualitative insights are in particularly high demand where they concern current crises of democratic politics, associated with terms like (affective) polarization, populism, representation gaps, realignment, misrecognition, ‘fake news’ or misinformation. To many citizens and expert observers alike, democracy has come under severe stress as a consequence of the rise of populist radical right parties, a proliferating set of highly emotionalized new conflicts – from migration and identity politics to, more recently, COVID, geopolitics, or climate change – as well as the spread of misinformation and “alternative truths” (see below). At this moment perhaps more than ever, sociology and political science as “sciences of crisis” (Claus Offe) are called upon to provide the public with the tools for a deeper understanding of the societies, publics, and political landscapes they live in. Beyond the important insights supplied by surveys, this requires employing qualitative methodologies, such as in-depth listening methods, systematic observations of real-life settings, and interpretive analyses of ordinary political reasoning and communication. As discussed in more detail below, the current crises of democratic politics thus present a crucial opportunity for the classical tradition of qualitative public opinion research to renew its promise.
Public opinion research and its critics
Public opinion stands for the elusive totality of citizens’ attitudes, beliefs, values, and preferences. Its origins trace back to the intellectual currents of the French and Scottish Enlightenment, with thinkers like Rousseau, Locke, and Montaigne laying foundational ideas (as discussed e.g. by Glynn and Huge 2008). While there are ongoing debates about its precise definition, it is widely undisputed that discerning citizens’ opinions on questions of public policy is pivotal to modern mass democracy. Not only do the degree to which political institutions, parties, and leaders heed the “will of the people”, alongside media’s capacity to foster the formation of informed opinions among all citizens (and not just ruling elites), serve as benchmarks for assessing the quality of democratic representation. Many radical and deliberative democratic theories also emphasize citizens’ ability to voice their concerns and integrate them into the political process as a fundamental characteristic of modern democracies (Habermas 2022).
Meanwhile, the advent of modern polling techniques somewhat disrupted the traditional notion of public opinion as a unitary “general will”. Surveys continue to reveal that political opinions are highly heterogeneous across the population and different social classes and strata, as well as unstable over time (Zaller 1992). In addition, studies following the canonical work by Converse (1964) show that a large number of citizens do not hold strong or stable opinions concerning political questions at all (see e.g. Lauderdale et al. 2018, Achen and Bartels 2016, della Carpini and Keeter 1996). These findings led to a reassessment of the term public opinion, which increasingly moved away from what Lippmann (1997[1922], 197) satirized as a “mysterious contrivance at work somewhere over and above the inhabitants of a nation […,] a collective soul, a national mind, a spirit of the age”.
Instead, public opinion came to much more simply denote the empirical distribution of survey responses. Early predictive successes of quantitative techniques, pioneered e.g. by the pollster Gallup, sparked what came to be known as the behavioral revolution in public opinion research (Converse 1984, Easton 1953, Key 1961). Public opinion soon became identified mainly with the opinion poll, standardized interviewing and quantitative analysis of large-N data. These techniques have since become the central mode through which governing elites perceive the “will of the people”, and through which democracies reflexively “know themselves”, e.g. by charting salient lines of conflicts; the divergent attitudes, values and grievances of social groups; or popular (dis)satisfaction with governance and policies (Igo 2007). This view centers on individuals as the central unit of analysis, with public opinion understood as an aggregate of individual attitudes and preferences charted on linear scales or in multidimensional spaces (Downs 1958, de Vries and Marks 2012).
Early on, researchers formulated and regularly renewed criticism of this “quantitative turn” resulting in a purely survey-based understanding of public opinion: the aggregation of atomistic individual responses that are deprived of their semantic and social-relational context, according to these critics, would only result in a flattened and overly homogenized picture of citizens’ thinking (Blumer 1948). Moreover, scaling techniques were criticized as falsely conflating distinct modes of political reasoning, e.g. such specific to dominant and dominated social classes and groups (Bourdieu 1984, 417ff.). Polls, critics observed, further tend to overestimate the extent to which citizens actually participate in political deliberations, and underestimate the idiosyncrasies, variability, instability, and contextuality of opinions (Converse 1970, Zaller 1992, Achen and Bartels 2016). Robert Bishop, who in a classic study (Bishop et al. 1980) had found that survey respondents also stated opinions on nonexistent policies invented by the researchers, opined that much of public opinion is “an illusion, an artifact of measurement and created by the way in which survey questions are designed and administered to the respondents” (Bishop 2005, xvi). As Bourdieu (1979) provocatively summarized, “public opinion does not exist” (see also: Russell 2023).
The qualitative contribution
Many of the approaches developed to go beyond the limitations revealed by the critics of public opinion research go back to the qualitative techniques which early opinion research had incorporated. A core insight is that survey-based studies of political attitudes need to be complemented much more extensively by qualitative studies of public opinion. As Katherine Cramer (2016, 20ff.) puts it:
“I find mass-sample public opinion surveys enormously helpful for capturing what a large population of people think at a given point in time. But for the task of figuring out why people think what they do I have found no better substitute than listening to them in depth. […] Poll-based analyses of opinion ought to be accompanied not just by focus groups or in-depth interviews but also by listening methods that expose us to the conversations and contexts of everyday life.”
Invaluable as polling is for mapping opinions on certain issues, it leaves out a substantial part of social and political realities. For instance: How do “ordinary people” make up their minds about politics (Saunders and Klandermans 2019, for Germany: Weisskircher and Hutter 2019)? What makes certain issues, policies, and rhetorical styles resonate with them (Leser and Pates 2022)? How do they articulate what political conflicts or demands are about “in their own words”? What are the “categories of practice” citizens draw on when making sense of the world, categories that may differ from the “categories of analysis” used by scientists and politicians (Brubaker and Cooper 2000)? Which stories, emotions, self-understandings, and ideas of group belonging shape their perception of political and social change (Hochschild 2016, Hilmar 2023, Sauerborn 2022)? How is media use and the evaluation of political information embedded in everyday routines and common-sense forms of reasoning (Lazarsfeld and Katz 1955, Gershon 2010)? How are attitudes shaped by the meanings, social dynamics, and affective atmospheres of the local places or workplace environments people inhabit (Beyer and Küster 2022, Cramer 2016, Garrido 2019, Harder and Opratko 2021, Pacewicz 2016, Ternullo 2024)? How do democratic expectations of citizens towards political institutions change (Butzlaff 2023)? And how do ways of thinking about politics as a whole differ between social groups, such as the middle and working class, or more or less educated groups of citizens (Gaxie 2011, Damhuis 2020; Wagner 2022, Westheuser 2021)?
To answer these questions means to recognize the people behind survey responses as socially embedded, “meaning-making beings” (Lamont et al. 2011), paying attention to the interplay of what becomes articulated as individual opinions with social relations (Desmond 2014, Emirbayer 1997), “visceral knowledge” (Pugh 2013), “group-styles” (Lichterman and Eliasoph 2014) or broader and often implicit “images of society” (Popitz et al. 1957, Dörre et al. 2013). In public opinion research, this means complementing surveys with methodologies and techniques like in-depth interviewing, focus group research, life histories, archival studies, and place-based and online political ethnographies (Mosley 2013, della Porta 2014, DeVault et al. 2012). Qualitative studies’ diverse range of tools and conceptual frameworks enable the systematic exploration of the tissue of social life and the intricate processes through which citizens attribute meaning to diverse objects, topics, groups, and events within their respective contexts and micro-publics. As Gerson and Damaske (2020, 36) write with respect to interview-based studies,
“unlike quantitative research, which often aims to verify (or reject) existing arguments and explanations, interviewing seeks to discover patterns and relationships that remain puzzling or open to substantial disagreement. Interviewing is thus a powerful tool for exploring complex social dynamics, investigating their possible causal structure, resolving empirical puzzles and theoretical debates, discovering the links between micro- and macro-processes, and developing new ways of conceiving and explaining poorly or incompletely understood trends and relationships”
As pointed out here, ascertaining the meaning people assign to their actions also gives qualitative research a unique point of entry to forms of causality which would otherwise remain hidden to scientific observation (and often even to the respondents themselves).
By observing how ordinary citizens “talk politics” (Gamson 1992), or asking people to explain their opinions, give reasons and set them in a larger context, important studies have sought to capture variation in modes of political meaning-making. Many qualitative approaches in that sense explore how communities act as filters and constructing entities of opinion formation and information processing, e.g. in contexts like people’s place of residence, political groups, or the experience of everyday life (e.g. Brubaker et al. 2006; Cramer 2016; Eliasoph 1997, Pacewicz 2016, Disch 2021). Other research highlighted the importance of situational interactions or the role of specific narratives for political opinion formation (Hochschild 2016, Polletta 2006), as well as the legacies shaping today’s worldviews (Lampland 1995). In the field of social psychology, traditions such as discursive psychology (e.g. Potter and Wetherell, 1987, Billig 1991) or social representations theory (e.g. Moscovici 1984, 1988, Moscovici & Marková 1998) use qualitative approaches to shed light on how individuals’ cognitive processes are deeply entangled with collective, intersubjectively generated representations of the social world (Howarth 2002, 2006, Jovchelovitch 2008) and social interactions (Potter & Edwards 1999, Billig, 2010). Qualitative approaches allow researchers to immerse themselves in contextual particularities and explore the multifaceted and often contradictory ways in which individuals experience and interpret social situations.
In the analysis stage, many approaches, including those inspired by psychoanalysis, develop ways to gauge the unspoken subtext of utterances and positionings (Volmerg et al. 1981, Salling Olesen 2012, Rothe et al. 2022). Moreover, qualitative methods are uniquely suited for reflexively dealing with the positionality of researchers and the presuppositions built into the categories of social science theories and methods (Durnová 2012). The sustained confrontation with social and political realities “in the field” helps facilitate theoretical innovation by correcting concepts that depict the world in a manner that is too formalistic, too static, or otherwise too far removed from its object (see e.g, Park 1952).
Although currently few contributions are labeled as such, many researchers today continue the long and venerable tradition of qualitative public opinion research. Yet, contributions remain fragmented into a number of separate niches within political science, sociology, social psychology, and political anthropology. Our agenda with the proposed network is to bring together, map, and critically engage this diverse field of approaches and foster exchange – both between qualitative researchers and between them and the wider field of research on politics. We thus strive to recover this tradition and map the field of today’s approaches, particularly as they relate to contemporary crises of politics (see below).
To overcome the boundaries between disciplinary and intellectual traditions within the qualitative camp, our network deliberately combines researchers and perspectives of very different analytical traditions, ranging from positivist to interpretivist approaches (see e.g. Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2014; Reed 2011, Blatter et al. 2016). As outlined below, our initial focus will be on creating a comprehensive overview of the history, methodologies, and future applications of qualitative public opinion research. This effort will be central to the discussions during the network’s first two meetings. We aim to synthesize our internal discussions into a scientific article that critically reviews the field, aiming to formulate an intervention into current scholarly debates and set an agenda for a tradition of qualitative opinion research.
Understanding the crisis of democratic politics: current fields of application
Besides this exercise of reconstruction, stock-taking, and synthesis, we believe that the best way to recover the promise of qualitative public opinion research is to demonstrate its usefulness for tackling the questions currently troubling researchers and the public. In our view, these questions often revolve around perceptions of a crisis in democratic politics (for recent examples see Schäfer and Zürn 2021; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Hacker and Pierson 2021). Three of the six planned meetings will each focus on specific aspects of these crises that have been at the center of public and academic concerns. During each of these meetings, subsets of network members with relevant expertise will showcase how qualitative political research can contribute. The three themes include:
1) the formation of new divides, comprising phenomena of polarization, realignment, and new political conflicts such as those giving rise to populist radical right parties;
2) the perceived emotionalization of politics, reflecting a public perception of heightened emotional intensity in opinions and public debates; as well as
3) the problem of misinformation and the role of evolving media systems in shaping opinions in what some describe as a “post-truth” era.
The first point stands for perceptions of a dangerous rift pulling apart the worldviews of sizable groups of citizens, dividing particularly members of the working and middle classes. At the latest since 2016’s “Trump/Brexit moment”, diagnoses of polarization and a new class realignment around a conservative (rural) “white working class” and a progressive (urban) academic middle class have become master narratives for describing the transformation of political conflict in Western societies (Hall et al. 2023, Dodd et al. 2017, Bergfeld 2019). Even though a number of studies have placed doubts on the basic diagnosis of class-based opinion polarization (Teney et al. 2023, 2024; Mau et al. 2023), many voters feel that centrifugal forces are everywhere pulling the center apart, threatening social cohesion and fueling political extremism. Regardless of evidence to the contrary, many citizens feel that whereas people once used to be able to resolve differences rationally and peacefully, today political discourse is characterized by acrimony, dogmatism, and firmly drawn battle lines.
In this context, qualitative contributions like those by Hochschild, Cramer, and Gest mentioned above were crucial for looking beyond the headlines and understanding the worldviews and motivations of social and political groups across the new divides – motivations which often complicated all-too-easy pictures of fanaticism and irrationality dominating the competing political projects’ public portrayals of each other. Qualitative research in the tradition of Weber’s “verstehende Soziologie” serves the important purpose of crossing the “empathy wall” (Hochschild) between classes and camps of political partisans (see also Lamont 2000, 2023). Interview-based studies of voters across different countries, for instance, revealed important connections between right-wing politics and classed experiences of devaluation (Hilmar 2023, Wagner 2022, Scheiring 2020, Beck and Westheuser 2022, Kumkar 2017, 2018, Schmidt et al. 2024). Other qualitative studies focused on understanding the roots of political opinions in social life, showed how new ‘cultural’ divides are symptomatic of an ethnicization, individualization, and moralization of social problems (Szombati 2018, Dörre et al. 2024, Pates and Leser 2021, Prasad et al. 2009, Siri 2021); and how political cleavage is underpinned by group-specific forms of common sense reasoning (Damhuis and Westheuser 2024; Damhuis 2020, Girard 2020, Zilles and Marg 2023, Coquard 2019, Butzlaff & Messenger-Zimmer 2020).
Not only are there concerns about a realignment of social and political divides, public debates have also been marked by the widespread perception that conflicts are becoming increasingly heated and emotionally charged. As the burgeoning field of research on affective polarization shows, it is sometimes not an increase in political disagreement per se that is at the heart of current conflicts, but new forms of mutual dislike between camps of political partisans taking on the character of social groups. It is thus not necessarily people’s opinions that are growing apart but the different political camps themselves who start to view each other as disliked out-groups (e.g. Iyengar et al. 2012; 2019; Wagner 2021; Reiljan 2020; Röllicke 2023; Zilles & Marg 2023, Kumkar 2024, Siri/Lewandowsky 2022). Such political animosity is only one example of a range of phenomena that give rise to the – hotly debated – diagnosis that society and the public sphere are becoming increasingly emotionalised (Neckel 2014; see critically Bens et al. 2019 and below).
According to this diagnosis, new and old media increasingly use emotional language to convey overly simplistic messages, contributing to a “digital fever” of constant outrage and agitation (Pörksen 2018); social movements and other political entrepreneurs build on or evoke fears of present and future developments, ranging from climate change to a looming totalitarianism in the face of the pandemic measures or the “Islamization of the Occident” (Diefenbach and von Scheve 2023; Sauerborn 2022); right-wing extremist and religious fundamentalist groups are considered to contribute to an “age of anger” (Mishra 2017) and a culture of hate (Emcke 2020); and commentators lament that, more generally, rational argument seems to have been replaced by affective sensitivities or gut feeling (Fleig and von Scheve 2019, Durnová 2019). As Anton Jäger (2023) argues, the previous era of post-politics appears to have given way to one of “hyper-politics”, in which ever-greater parts of daily life are becoming politicized, often in a highly emotional and moralized way, yet without the organizational and institutional structures to channel such conflict.
Other authors have criticized the idea that public debates are becoming increasingly charged with affects, or have questioned whether an emotionalization of politics is necessarily problematic and a symptom of crisis. As these critics argue affect has always intertwined with cognition and societies have always been “affective” (Barbalet 2002, Bens et al. 2019; Dukes et al. 2021, Fleig and von Scheve 2019). Rather than lamenting that emotions are becoming more prominent in the public sphere, there is thus a need to understand how exactly emotions play out in public opinion formation. We are convinced that qualitative research can help gain such an understanding. It provides the tools to analyze in depth what mechanisms play into increasingly heated conflict (Röllicke 2023); when and why people get “triggered” by certain socio-political debates (Mau et al. 2023); what role emotions play in public opinion phenomena such as right-wing extremism (Shoshan 2016) and support for right-wing populism (Diefenbach and von Scheve 2022; Leser and Spissinger 2020; Pates and Leser 2021; Rhein 2023; Rhein and Möhring-Hesse 2022, Illouz 2023); how individual and collective emotions are shaped by political institutions (Shoshan 2016; von Scheve et al. 2014), social and cultural feeling rules (Diefenbach 2022; Eckert 2019, Hochschild 1979; Hilmar et al. 2024, Ulinskaitė et al. 2024, Sauerborn 2019; 2024, Sauerborn and Neckel 2023) and digital media (Papacharissi 2014,); and how the way in which emotions are embedded in politics and society has changed and evolved over time (Beyer 2022, 2023; Frevert 2021, 2022; Frevert and Jäkel 2023, Siri 2024). Through close reading of texts (Berg et al. 2020), in-depth interviews, focus groups (Diefenbach 2023) or ethnographic methods, qualitative studies of public opinion allow us to open the black box of perceived emotionalization, do justice to the multidimensionality of existing grievances (Off 2024) and move beyond the outdated dichotomy of emotion and rationality.
A third crisis – real or perceived – that is currently heavily debated concerns the proliferation of what is commonly termed “fake news,” misinformation, and disinformation (Phillips and Milner 2021). Enabled by digital information technologies, communication has transitioned from one-to-many to many-to-many, removing traditional gatekeepers and allowing almost anyone to distribute content in new “hybrid media systems” (Chadwick 2013). Scholars have identified multiple disruptions in the formation of political opinions as a result of these changes. On the supply side, the emergence of alternative news networks (Benkler et al. 2018, Lewis 2018, Marcks and Fielitz 2020) disrupts audiences with false information, keeping users engaged to serve their own political or economic interests. Additionally, populist leaders can bypass “control” by established media, further binding their followers with one-sided information and high communication intensity.
On the side of media users, however, the changed media system with its highly specialized news outlets largely enables the avoidance of opposing viewpoints, thus promoting reinforced “confirmation bias” (Taber and Lodge 2006) in information-seeking. Digital infrastructures allow users to increasingly surround themselves only with like-minded individuals, a phenomenon known as an “echo chamber” (Sunstein 2003) or “filter bubble” (Pariser 2011), further exacerbated by algorithmically curated information digests on platforms such as YouTube. Similarly, Habermas (2022) critically reflects on the ongoing structural transformation of the public sphere through the rapid expansion of digital media, which not only contributes to an enlargement but also to increasing fragmentation of the public sphere, which carries the risk that there is no longer a common place for exchange and negotiation: talking to each other has become just talking past each other (see also Seeliger and Sevignani 2022, Siri 2014, 2024). Moreover, the sheer volume of information—an information overload—has led media consumers to often feel disoriented and unsure which sources to trust (Bail 2021, Ternullo 2022). As a result, public opinion is more vulnerable than ever to manipulation and prone to processes of extreme fragmentation and isolation, as well as a loss of fundamental reliance on facts as the basis for communal, political reasoning (as decried in an earlier context by Arendt 1967).
As intuitive as these discussions may sound, recent research has shown that many of the central assumptions, such as the increasing isolation of information digests, are not necessarily valid (Bail et al. 2018, Bail 2021). To gain more nuanced insights into the effects of these changes on processes of political opinion formation, there is an urgent need for qualitative research approaches (Grigoropoulou and Small 2022). Scholars have already begun to investigate these impacts from a user’s perspective (Marwick 2018, Tripodi 2019). For example, they have focused on the interaction between users and technologies (Schuell 2012, Marwick and Partin 2022), demonstrating how dynamics of co-construction of facts can explain adherence to false and highly partisan information (Tripodi 2023), or how emotional appeals prime users to collect and sift through content (Berg 2023 b). Other qualitative research in this vein has shown how social media settings and spaces—chat forums, comment sections, etc.—fundamentally change the pillars of communication among users, leading them to engage in certain ways, such as not truly seeking information but rather performing a specific identity (Berg 2023a, Kumkar 2022, 2023, Schwarz 2021).
As members of this proposed network, we believe that qualitative research holds the key to further unpacking how modes of political opinion formation evolve under the condition of hyperconnectivity and new media infrastructures (Brubaker 2023). This includes, but is not limited to, decoding different culturally-embedded interpretations by which people make sense of the information environment, how they engage with certain content and what evaluative heuristics they use, what meanings they attribute to specific media, and especially how they translate these engagements and perceptions into political opinion formation.
Methodological challenges
Qualitative perspectives in the study of public opinion also come with methodological challenges (for central debates see Blatter et al. 2016, Brady et al. 2006, 2010, Goertz and Mahoney 2012, Thomas 2005). Those include, amongst others, the researcher’s positionality, the (non-)alignment of respondents’ stated attitudes and their political behavior, and the communication of qualitative findings and methodology. The need to deal reflexively with the researchers’ position in the field of research and how this might impact both the research and the researcher, is not unique to qualitative research. However, issues of social distance and proximity or affectedness and involvement become particularly pertinent when using qualitative methods that involve a direct interaction of the researcher with the research subjects (Lareau 2021). Especially where research seeks to contribute to democracy’s understanding of its crises, researchers must pay particular attention to questions of positionality, epistemology and forms of social criticism as embedded in everyday methodological challenges. How does one’s own understanding of democracy influence research questions or communicating findings? How does interviewing or interpretation of data work in a field of political difference (see e.g. Kong et al. 2001, Edwards et al. 2023, DeVault et al. 2012)? Not only does this require a reflection of research ethics, and of how one’s own presence might influence people’s answers or how one’s own way of looking at the world might influence the interpretation of what is said or done. It also raises more practical questions, for example of how to position oneself vis-à-vis people who hold opinions or engage in practices one considers politically and ethically problematic (e.g. Damhuis and de Jonge 2022; Cyr and Wallace Goodman 2024; see also the debate in McVeigh 2017, Shapira 2017).
The question of how to interpret what respondents themselves say, for example in interviews or focus groups, also goes beyond the issue of positionality. In the social sciences, there is a general tendency to conflate people’s stated attitudes with their behavior, to assume that the former are consistent with the latter and to thus infer people’s behavior from their verbal accounts. This tendency has been called the “attitudinal fallacy” (Jerolmack and Khan, 2014). While qualitative studies sometimes pride themselves in getting a deeper understanding of people’s attitudes and beliefs, for example through in-depth interviews, it is important to note that qualitative methods do not per se ‘solve’ this problem: It remains important to be mindful of this potential attitudinal fallacy and to reflect on how specific qualitative methodologies process it. This might entail triangulating verbal accounts with observation, reflecting on the limitations of verbal accounts in the analysis (Cerulo 2014), or, as practiced by reconstructive methodologies for interpreting qualitative data, explicitly ‘bracketing’ the facticity of what is explicitly communicated and to focus on the implicit and/or latent structures documented in the practices of communication (Bohnsack 2010; Garfinkel and Sacks 1976; Kumkar 2019; Oevermann 2002; Rothe et al. 2022; Bereswill et al. 2010).
Lastly, following good practice of communicating qualitative findings and methodology poses particular practical challenges in a research field that is centered on the standards of quantitative research. Those include, for example, deciding how much evidence (direct citations etc.) is needed to support the argument, how to describe the iterative process of research, and how to document the research process (e.g. the coding procedure) – all the while navigating the potential tensions between demands and restrictions (e.g. of length) of journals and doing justice to and protecting one’s research subjects. Using qualitative approaches in a field that is predominantly quantitative also requires a particular ability to communicate across different logics in journal reviews or conferences and – oftentimes – to put in the extra effort to convince the dominant paradigm that a qualitative approach can provide a valuable addition and potentially new perspective to the quantitative study of public opinion. While none of those challenges are per se new and potential solutions to some of them have been suggested elsewhere (e.g. Jerolmack and Khan 2014 and Cerulo 2014 on the attitudinal fallacy), they are nevertheless an important part of the day-to-day work of researchers who use qualitative methods to study the current crises of public opinion. This network thus also serves to exchange best practices of how to navigate such challenges on both a practical and methodological level.
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