ESS-02 / The social contract
Democracy's delivery gap
Where is democracy most desired but least delivered?
PlannedFlagshipResearch question, not a published result
The question
Compare the democratic principles citizens value with their assessment of how those principles work in practice.
What the analysis will test
- Primary quantity
- Importance minus perceived performance for comparable democratic principles.
- Evidence
- ESS rounds 6, 10. Modules: democracy.
- Primary comparison
- Democratic promise-gap matrix. The final form depends on validated data and uncertainty.
- Publication threshold
- Pinned source editions, reviewed questionnaire comparability, survey-design-aware intervals, disclosure checks and reproducible aggregate outputs.
What this evidence does not prove
Perceived democratic performance is not an independent institutional audit; item wording and fieldwork differences require review.
The ESS interviews different probability samples in each round. It measures structural differences and change, not today's mood or the same individuals over time.
Sources and next release
This page reserves the permanent address for ESS-02. Estimates and downloads will appear here after the data, statistical, editorial and reproducibility checks pass.