Democracy From Within: A Democratic Cultural Schema in the US Public

Are members of the public still committed to democracy? Existing studies often ask whether members of the public sanction political actors who break institutional or procedural norms. In contrast, we study a shared cultural horizon, which grounds democracy as a way of living. Drawing on Civil Sphere Theory and the sociology of culture and cognition, we conceptualise the horizon as a binary discourse, which can be internalised as a cultural schema by individuals. Through a concept association task administered to a representative sample of the US public, we uncover a widely internalised democratic schema, which is shared across partisan divides and predicts evaluations of political actors. We temper fears of democratic decline, at least at the level of a shared cultural horizon in the United States, provide an individual-level perspective on Civil Sphere Theory, and bridge two sometimes conflicting traditions in cultural sociology.