Conflicts about the German Energiewende as a threat for democracy?

The transformation of national economies to achieve carbon-reduction goals creates a need to build new infrastructure. However, infrastructure projects create conflicts. The question of this chapter is whether these conflicts are confined to the policy field or whether they threaten the legitimacy of the democratic system. Theoretically, the latter might be true: polarisation in the field is high, and case studies suggest that protesters are dissatisfied with the democratic system. However, based on a corpus of ~5,800 written contributions to German electricity grid planning procedures, this study argues that, at least in the written public participation context, disaffection with democracy is not a prominent phenomenon. Only 3.3% of contributions mention democracy. These contributions reveal contempt as a moral emotion, but the contempt is directed towards the quality of the public participation procedure, rather than the democratic system in its entirety.