Abstract In the face of populist challenges, citizens’ conceptions of democracy and process preferences are increasingly being studied, based on the assumption that democratic resilience is dependent on citizen support. However, the attitudes and behaviour of political elites are just as relevant. Elites were long assumed to lean towards an elite-centred, ‘institutional’ style of democracy. However, recent developments such as the rise of populism and political polarization suggest a different trend, as politicians themselves seem to be losing trust in institutions. We explore the actual distribution of legislators’ preferences in the process space today based on novel data from the United States and Germany, offering a comparative perspective. We measure process preferences on a continuum ranging from support for people-centred democracy to support for elite-centred democracy. Our findings demonstrate that the preferences of legislators in Germany are normally distributed along this continuum, while those of legislators in the more polarized United States lean towards a people-centred process. In both countries, control of government, seniority and electoral security are found to be important determinants of process preferences.
Crowder‐Meyer et al. (2026) studied this question.