AbstractThe question of the contested nature of the concept of democracy is neither in doubt within the political science debate, nor new. What is new, however, is the attention paid to the knowledge of competing ideas of democracy in literature. The development of concepts of the "D-word" beyond Eurocentric hegemony was accompanied by a critical review of methodological approaches. Against the background of these methodological challenges, the requirements for more differentiated or mixed

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... dological approaches are discussed in the literature. In this article, a combined approach of the repertory grid and the semantic differential methods is proposed to enrich the innovative methodological dynamics of investigating the meaning of democracy. The article gives an introduction to the repertory grid method and illustrates, with a case study, how the Singaporean middle-class views democracy. These repertory grid face-to-face interviews serve as a starting point for the creation of valid polarity profiles for the semantic differential method—a method which, like the repertory grid, is used to measure the connotative or affective meaning of objects, but in a quantitative design so that representativeness can be achieved. Through this approach, the constructivist approach of repertory grid is partly combined with positivistic survey research, and thus the approach is inductive with deductive research.