Democracies and their Historical Self-Perceptions

Project Overview

Democracy and Gender Working Group

Democracy is a historical phenomenon and an ongoing process. It is continually reconceived, negotiated, and practiced. It is the goal of research on historical democracy at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History to investigate this in all of its facets and ambivalences. It scrutinizes the conditions in which democracies evolved, how they developed and in which way they changed. Research on democracies at the IfZ is interested in institutional structures, normative discourses and social practices linked to the concept of democracy, as well as in the motives and perspectives of actors who tied their actions to democracy. Not least, it analyzes the historical self-images that democracies have developed and the impact of these modes of democratic self-assurance.