What Citizens Mean by Democracy: Partisan Differences in Open-Ended Survey Responses

Do voters from different partisan camps understand democracy in the same way? We analyze more than 25,000 open-ended survey responses from representative samples in 14 countries, classifying answers with a fine-tuned language model and sentence embeddings. Citizens most often define democracy through individual and civil rights; multidimensional definitions are rare, and elections are mentioned by only 17% of respondents. Yet shared vocabulary masks partisan divergence. Far-right voters and non-voters are less likely to mention civil rights, elections, and horizontal accountability, while far-right voters more often invoke majoritarian principles. Among respondents mentioning rights, left voters connect rights to equality and citizenship, whereas right voters emphasize freedom of speech. Democratic contestation thus unfolds within democratic language, creating openings for selective elite reframing.