Deliberating or Thinking (Twice) About Democratic Preferences: What German Citizens Want From Democracy

Abstract

The question, ‘which kind of democratic governance people prefer’, has moved to the forefront in current democracy research. This article uses existing hypotheses on democratic preferences as an input and employs an advanced research design to find out what citizens want if they had engaged in deliberation and reflection. We conducted an online-experiment with a deliberative treatment asking 256 German citizens in 2016. Our findings show that deliberation does not lead to more informed or differential preferences for governance models compared with getting informed or ‘thinking twice’. One reason are high levels of consistency between basic democratic values and governance choices already before the experiment, contradicting our initial assumption that preferences about democracy are generally ill-formed. Overall, our experiment shows that post-deliberative democratic preferences are mainly driven by issue salience and disenchantment with the actual shape of representative democracy. We detect a sort of a ‘populist’ impulse where disenchantment conduces to calls for a stronger voice of the ‘people’ and participatory governance models, irrespective of their concrete design.

How citizens evaluate participatory processes: a conjoint analysis

“…Furthermore, the effects were similar across policy issues and process preferences, suggesting that the effects are a relatively stable in society. The results are therefore able to give new insights into what type of participatory mechanisms ordinary citizens want to see introduced on a more detailed level compared to previous research that have examined either broad process preferences (Bengtsson and Christensen 2016;Gherghina and Geissel 2017;Font, Wojcieszak, and Navarro 2015) or attitudes to specific mechanisms (Goldberg, Wyss, and Bächtiger 2019;Jacquet 2018;Christensen and von Schoultz 2019).…”

“…It has been difficult to ask ordinary citizens how they feel about democratic innovations since most citizens are unfamiliar with the participatory mechanisms on offer. For example, it makes little sense to simply ask people whether they would like to see more deliberative mini-publics without carefully explaining what they entail (Goldberg, Wyss, and Bächtiger 2019). Previous studies relying on surveys have asked more generally whether a respondent supported the use of public discussions in connection to decision-making (Christensen, Himmelroos, and Grönlund 2017;Christensen and von Schoultz 2019).…”

“…This approach provides us with insights into what democratic benefits a participatory mechanism can provide but fails to consider how citizens evaluate these mechanisms and their characteristics. Other studies examine popular attitudes towards specific types of participatory mechanisms (Goldberg, Wyss, and Bächtiger 2019;Jacquet 2018;Christensen and von Schoultz 2019), or differences in process preferences, i.e. how political decision should be made (Bengtsson and Christensen 2016;Gherghina and Geissel 2017;Font, Wojcieszak, and Navarro 2015).…”

How citizens evaluate participatory processes: A conjoint analysis

“…Furthermore, the effects were similar across policy issues and process preferences, suggesting that the effects are a relatively stable in society. The results are therefore able to give new insights into what type of participatory mechanisms ordinary citizens want to see introduced on a more detailed level compared to previous research that have examined either broad process preferences (Bengtsson and Christensen 2016;Gherghina and Geissel 2017;Font, Wojcieszak, and Navarro 2015) or attitudes to specific mechanisms (Goldberg, Wyss, and Bächtiger 2019;Jacquet 2018;Christensen and von Schoultz 2019).…”

“…This approach provides us with insights into what democratic benefits a participatory mechanism can provide but fails to consider how citizens evaluate these mechanisms and their characteristics. Other studies examine popular attitudes towards specific types of participatory mechanisms (Goldberg, Wyss, and Bächtiger 2019;Jacquet 2018;Christensen and von Schoultz 2019), or differences in process preferences, i.e. how political decision should be made (Bengtsson and Christensen 2016;Gherghina and Geissel 2017;Font, Wojcieszak, and Navarro 2015).…”