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

In democracies around the world, democratic innovations have been proposed to strengthen citizen participation in decision-making and bridge the gap between citizens and politics. These participatory instruments range from more deliberative to more majoritarian, vote-centric approaches, or even hybrid combinations of the two. For these processes to effectively impact decision-making and bridge the gap between politics and society, it is essential that politicians endorse them and that citizens perceive them as a legitimate way of decision-making. Thus, when designing and organizing participation processes, it is important to understand which designs are supported by citizens and politicians and whether, and if so how, their preferences diverge. A growing body of research has examined citizens’ preferences for, and evaluations of, various democratic innovations that enhance citizen participation. Prior conjoint experiments involving citizens have shown which designs citizens support (e.g., Christensen, 2020; Goldberg and Bächtiger, 2023; Van der Does & Kantorowicz, 2023). Recently, survey experimental studies have explored the perspectives of elected representatives as well (e.g., De Smedt, 2024; Jacquet et al., 2020). However, we do not know whether the preferences of citizens and politicians regarding process designs overlap. This paper contributes to this research gap by being the first to compare citizens’ and politicians’ support for different design features of deliberative processes by using data from identical conjoint experiments in both groups. To achieve this, we conducted a conjoint experiment on local participation processes, in which we varied different modes of participation – vote-based, deliberation-based, and hybrid combinations – alongside other design features, such as the initiator, topic, and bindingness of the outcome, fielded among 1,457 local politicians and 24,630 Dutch citizens in 2024. This allows us to examine the extent to which citizens and politicians differ in how they prefer citizens to be involved. We furthermore aim to better understand these differences: do local politicians, who are also ‘citizens’ of their constituencies, reflect the preferences of their fellow citizens or does their role as political officeholders shapes distinct preferences? We hypothesize that politicians, as actors within representative institutions, are more skeptical of extensive and binding forms of citizen participation than citizens. Our result will shed light on the differences between citizens' and politicians' preferences for designs of democratic innovations, offering insights into how such innovations can be tailored to bridge the gap between citizens and politics.