Deliberating or Thinking (Twice) About Democratic Preferences: What German Citizens Want From Democracy
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321719843967 |
| Author | Dominik Wyss,Saskia Goldberg,André Bächtiger |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719843967
Political Studies
2020, Vol. 68(2) 311 –331
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321719843967
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Deliberating or Thinking
(Twice) About Democratic
Preferences: What German
Citizens Want From
Democracy
Saskia Goldberg , Dominik Wyss
and André Bächtiger
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.
Keywords
deliberation, democratic preferences, survey experiment
Accepted: 24 March 2019
What do citizens want from democracy and democratic governance? And which demo-
cratic procedures – representative democracy, direct democracy or citizen deliberation –
do they view as legitimate when policy choices are made? The topic of democratic process
University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany
Corresponding author:
Saskia Goldberg, University of Stuttgart, 70174 Stuttgart, Germany.
Email: saskia.goldberg@sowi.uni-stuttgart.de
843967PCX0010.1177/0032321719843967Political StudiesGoldberg et al.
research-article2019
Article
312 Political Studies 68(2)
preferences has moved to the forefront of democracy research in recent years. Several
theses – some complementary, others competing – have emerged in the literature: the
‘political dissatisfaction hypothesis’ suggests that preferences for more citizen involve-
ment and more participatory schemes of governance are driven by disenchantment with
the actual shape of representative democracy, whereas the (potentially complementary)
‘new politics hypothesis’ claims that political sophistication breeds appetite for more par-
ticipation (Dalton et al., 2001). By contrast, the ‘Stealth thesis’ proposes that many citi-
zens prefer effective and efficient policy-making (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, 2002) to
participatory schemes, while Neblo et al. (2010) find in a prominent study that citizens
have a desire to get involved in politics and to engage in deliberative activities. Other
research has added nuance to these debates, by correlating preferences for stealth and
direct democracy with issue type (Wojcieszak, 2014), ideological and socio-demographic
variables (Bengtsson and Mattila, 2009; Coffé and Michels, 2014; Webb, 2013) or by
probing for complex dimensionalities of representative, direct-democratic and techno-
cratic schemes of governance (Font et al., 2015). Yet, findings remain ambiguous and we
have surprisingly little robust knowledge on what citizens actually want from democracy.
As VanderMolen (2017: 696) writes in the context of stealth attitudes, the ‘weak results
suggest that although citizens may not be happy with the way democracy works, they do
not necessarily have strong or detailed opinions about a procedural replacement’.
In this article, we set up an experimental design allowing us to obtain a deeper under-
standing of citizens’ process preferences. Our starting point is that existing studies, rest-
ing on pure survey-based research, may tap into ill-informed attitudes and preferences,
especially when citizens are confronted with highly abstract issues such as democratic
governance schemes. In particular, we do not know the counterfactual, what democratic
preferences citizens would have if they had the possibility to deliberate about it and weigh
the pros and cons of the various schemes. It is fairly possible that citizens have biased
views on which democratic model works best for them. Getting informed about the vari-
ous pros and cons of different governance models and deliberating about them might help
citizens to structure their raw opinions and align their general preferences on democracy
with existing (and novel) governance models. Therefore, we created a ‘deliberative’ treat-
ment in order to help citizens to develop more informed preferences on governance mod-
els. As we describe in detail below, the experiment we conducted in 2016 with 256
German citizens comprised three treatment groups: an information-deliberation group, an
information-only group and a pure control group getting neither information nor delibera-
tion. But even in the pure control treatment, participants had the chance to ‘think twice’
about their preferences for governance models rather than be given only a few seconds to
think about and respond to this hugely complex topic in a standard survey design. We
combined our treatments with specific decision ‘scenarios’, whereby we confronted par-
ticipants with pre-selected ‘governance schemes’. We think that the juxtaposition of deci-
sion ‘scenarios’ leads to more meaningful choices compared with pure (and serially
asked) survey questions on governance schemes (VanderMolen, 2017). In our experi-
ment, we presented participants three existing governance models (the traditional repre-
sentative model in Germany, a Swiss direct democracy model combining representative
politics and direct-democratic voting and a Baden-Württemberg model combining repre-
sentative politics and citizen dialogue). In addition, we presented them a putative ‘inte-
grative’ model combining representative, dialogical and direct-democratic instruments
(as proposed by the Bertelsmann Foundation 2014 under the label ‘hybrid democracy’).
In sum, the goal of our article is to introduce a more powerful methodological approach
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