DFG Research 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 more details see the project description below.

The network is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is organized by Linus Westheuser, Anna Berg and Lena Röllicke. 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, Linus Westheuser, Anna Berg and Lena Röllicke.

Background of the Network

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.

Understanding the crisis of democratic politics: current fields of application

Besides 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 are:

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.

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.