Citizens’ Preferences for Generic Democratic Practices: A Conjoint Experiment in the U.S. and Germany

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 paper, we apply such a perspective to the study 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 representative sample of citizens from the United States and Germany to analyze which scenario of democratic decision-making on concrete policy measures people would prefer. We focus on deliberative citizen forums, parliaments, and strong executive leaders as main institutions dealing with a specific policy. 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 outcome. We show that citizens in both countries prefer that legislature plays a key role and that several bodies take part in the decision-making process. Our study makes a novel contribution to research on citizens’ democratic preferences by adopting a problem-based and comparative perspective.