Designing Democracy on ´Mars´ and ´Earth´: Exploring Citizens´ Democratic Preferences in a Deliberative and Co-Creative Design

ongoing

DDME sets up a bottom-up, co-creative and deliberative design to obtain a deeper understanding of citizens´ democratic preferences in two Western (Germany and United States) and one non-Western country (India). Democratic preferences contain procedural preferences for different governance modes – such as participatory, delegative, consensual or majoritarian forms of democratic governance – as well as preferences for democratic goals and values - such as equality or social justice. Based on input and feedback from democratic theorists, DDME explores how citizens imagine “ideal” democracy (on “Mars”) and mend “real” democracy (i.e., how they would reform the political systems they live in (on “Earth”)) when they had the chance to deliberate, i.e. to ´weigh´ reasons regarding the pros and cons of the various conceptions and schemes of democracy in a dialogical setting with their fellow citizens. The deliberative field experiments will comprise 600-900 representative or maximally diverse citizens and will be run on a “hybrid” platform combining synchronous and asynchronous modes of interaction. DDME analyses which factors drive different democratic preferences of citizens in the three different countries and which principles and arguments play a role in the opinion and preference formation of citizens´ democratic preferences (with a specific eye on opinion and preference change). The project is the first to delegate democratic designing to citizens adopting a systematic and global approach where citizens together with democratic theorists think through advanced theoretical inputs and think creatively about optimal democratic designs.