Bridging the Gap or Two Worlds Apart? Comparing Citizens' and Politicians' Preferences for Democratic Innovations

Democratic innovations range from deliberative to vote-centric approaches, with increasing attention being paid to hybrid combinations. For these processes to be effective, it is essential that politicians endorse them and that citizens perceive them as a legitimate way of decision-making, and therefore to understand which designs are supported by citizens and politicians respectively. A growing body of research has examined citizens’ preferences for various democratic innovation designs, and more recently, experimental studies have explored the perspectives of elected representatives as well. However, we hardly know whether the preferences of citizens and politicians regarding specific design aspects overlap. This paper contributes by being the first to compare citizens’ and politicians’ support for different design features of deliberative processes, using data from identical conjoint experiments fielded among 1,457 local politicians and 24,630 citizens. The experiments varied participation processes on initiator, topic, mandate and participation mode: vote-based, deliberation-based or hybrid. The results point towards common ground in design features for participatory processes, most notably hybrid processes with consultative outcomes with a political obligation to discuss.