Political Studies

The question, ‘which kind of democratic governance people prefer’, has moved to the forefront in current democracy research. This article uses existing hypotheses on democratic preferences as an input and employs an advanced research design to find out what citizens want if they had engaged in deliberation and reflection. We conducted an online-experiment with a deliberative treatment asking 256 German citizens in 2016. Our findings show that deliberation does not lead to more informed or differential preferences for governance models compared with getting informed or ‘thinking twice’. One reason are high levels of consistency between basic democratic values and governance choices already before the experiment, contradicting our initial assumption that preferences about democracy are generally ill-formed. Overall, our experiment shows that post-deliberative democratic preferences are mainly driven by issue salience and disenchantment with the actual shape of representative democracy. We detect a sort of a ‘populist’ impulse where disenchantment conduces to calls for a stronger voice of the ‘people’ and participatory governance models, irrespective of their concrete design.

Deliberating or Thinking (Twice) About Democratic Preferences: What German Citizens Want From Democracy