Democratic innovations in a context of extensive direct democracy: results from a survey experiment on citizens’ perceptions of mini-publics in Switzerland

Democratic innovations have proliferated across the globe. Switzerland has been a latecomer in this trend. This is mainly due to its traditionally rather elaborate direct democracy in which additional channels of citizen participation were long considered unnecessary. Recently however, new forms of citizen participation have been increasingly used in Switzerland as well, especially at the local government level. While their nature and their functioning, as well as the reasons for their setting up have been studied, we still know very little about how such democratic innovations are perceived by citizens – who are already used to extensive citizen rights and frequent opportunities for political participation. The study presented in this paper sheds light on this question. It draws on a representative population survey with 3800 respondents conducted early 2023 in the canton of Zurich, after the holding of three climate assemblies whose participants were randomly selected. In the first part of the paper, we analyse citizens’ perceptions of these assemblies, as well as, more generally, their attitudes towards increased citizen participation in the context of extensive direct democracy. In the second part of the paper, we report the results of a conjoint experiment built into the population survey, that allows to isolate respondents’ preferences regarding different process-specific characteristics of mini-publics. The analysis shows how a mini-public must be designed in order to increase the willingness to participate in ordinary citizens. Overall, we find that citizens who have a positive attitude towards traditional direct democracy are generally open towards democratic innovations, as well. However, to citizens with lower levels of political efficacy, mini-publics such as the climate assemblies that were held in the canton of Zurich turn out to be more attractive than traditional instances of direct democracy. This leads us to conclude that, even in a context of extensive direct democracy, democratic innovations have the potential to further stimulate political participation and enhance citizenship.