A Generic Approach to Understanding Citizens’ Preferences for Democratic Processes

In light of current challenges to representative democracy, research on different democratic governance modes from a citizen perspective is essential. Rather than adopting a standard model-based approach to governance modes we take a problem-based perspective with an eye on generic democratic practices (Warren 2017). In this study, we apply such a perspective to the analysis of democratic preferences to get a more accurate picture of which combinations of democratic practices citizens would support in particular contexts (König et al. 2022). Specifically, we draw on a conjoint experiment with a large-scaled sample of citizens from the United States and Germany to analyze which scenario of democratic decision-making on concrete policy measures people would prefer. This scenario design can take good account of the diverse nature of democratic governance. We focus on deliberative citizen forums, parliaments, and strong executive leaders as main institutions dealing with a specific policy to compare participatory, representative, and executive forms of democratic governance. By adding the mode of executive governance, our study significantly contributes to research on citizens’ democratic preferences often focusing on participatory vs. representative democracy. We then distinguish between different stages of the policy-making process, such as the phase of preparation of a policy, the way to come to a decision, and the final decision. The experiment combines these features with issue- and outcome-related aspects of democratic governance. Our study makes a novel contribution to research on citizens’ democratic preferences by adopting a problem-based and comparative perspective.