Inclusive democratic decision-making: perceived political representation and support for democratic innovations

A key value of democratic governance is the inclusion of people with various backgrounds, beliefs, and interests; however in many Western-European democracies a part of the electorate feels left out. Democratic innovations, such as deliberative minipublics and referendums, are proposed to improve the inclusiveness of democratic processes (e.g. Dryzek et al, 2019). The support for such democratic innovations has often been explained by dissatisfaction with institutions of representative democracy, political efficacy, political interest, and populist attitudes (e.g. Gherghina & Geißel, 2019, Pilet et al., 2022; Werner & Jacobs, 2022; Zaslove et al., 2021). However, relatively little is known about the support among politically underrepresented groups in society. Women, lower-educated and younger people are on average more supportive of direct or deliberative democracy (Coffé & Michels, 2014; Talukder and Pilet, 2021), yet it remains unknown whether perceived political (under)representation plays a role. Typically, citizens support democratic innovations to get their preferred policies (see e.g. Werner, 2020). Citizens who feel underrepresented in and dissatisfied with representative democracy may therefore be more likely to support democratic innovations in general, as a new means to gain political influence. Though, it probably depends on the type of democratic innovation. Direct democratic innovations, such as referendums, are a majoritarian instrument. Consequently minority citizens may be less likely to support them; whereas they may be more supportive of deliberative democratic innovations. In this paper, we study to what extent minoritized groups (based on e.g. migration background, gender identity, education, age, region and religion) are more supportive of direct and deliberative democratic innovations. We also wish to examine why people from politically minoritized groups support various innovations. Firstly, we test to what extent support for democratic innovations among people from various minority backgrounds can be explained by perceived substantive political representation of ‘people like them’. Secondly, we examine whether the perceived substantive representation of specific societal groups (people with a migration background, women, lower educated, etc.) contributes to our understanding of support for democratic innovations, and if this is conditional for the extent people identify with these groups. Thirdly, we test whether these effects differ for various types of democratic innovations. To do so, we collect original survey data in the Netherlands (spring 2023), including questions on perceived substantive political representation of ‘people like me’ and various societal groups, self-identification with these societal groups, and support for differently designed democratic innovations (direct, deliberative and combinations thereof).