The existing mechanism dominated by parties and elections to facilitate democratic rule is in crisis. Merely choosing between different candidates or parties and their policy-programs every few years isn’t in line with citizens’ process-preferences, many citizens prefer more participatory will-formation and decision-making processes; moreover, with diversifying societies, existing electoral mechanisms are increasingly unable to accurately capture citizens’ policy-preferences. Various potential cures have been developed and examined to address diagnosed symptoms of a crisis. For a long time, in democratic theory and equally in empirical studies, the focus of such efforts has been on participatory processes that establish additional will-formation and decision-making processes alongside existing representative ones. How to purposefully embed such processes within a political system that is until now dominated by representative processes remains a research gap. A different approach to making the political system more participatory is to democratize existing representative processes – instead of simply adding participatory procedures.
In the paper, I follow latter approach and discuss the benefits of participatory reforms to elections. Specifically, I empirically evaluate the recently developed ‘enhanced policy voting’ (EPV). The EPV is characterized by, first, citizens voting exclusively on policy programs. Second, the voting act itself is enhanced; i.e. instead of having one vote to choose between policy programs as a whole, citizens may modify the policy-bundles using cumulative-voting and cross-voting. The EPV was tested in a field-experiment conducted in cooperation with a municipality in Germany in 2017. Over 800 citizens participated. Drawing upon the data generated in the field-experiment, I will answer: 1. Is the EPV in line with citizens’ process-preferences? 2. Do voting-results using the EPV capture citizens’ policy-preferences more precisely than voting-results of existing elections? Based on the findings, I will discuss the prospect of participatory reforms that strengthen the policy-dimension of elections in future conceptions of democracy.