Democracy Preferences, Participation, and Deliberation

Abstract

There is an ongoing controversy whether citizens are willing to participate in politics in general and in democratic deliberation in particular. While Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (2002) argue that citizens are perfectly happy to be passive by-standers of politics, Neblo et al. (2010) finds that there is a clear willingness to deliberate and that those most willing to participate in a deliberative process are those who are disenchanted with standard partisan politics. Still, the empirical evidence is mixed. Both Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (2002) and Mutz (2006) argue that most people tend to avoid political conflicts and prefer to engage themselves in political discussions with others who share the same political views. Deliberative democracy, on the other hand, emphasizes the importance of putting forward and considering different viewpoints (Sunstein 2002, Landemore 2013). We still do not know very much how preferences on democratic processes vary between people and how the variation is reflected in the willingness to take part in deliberation. Using Finnish data, Bengtsson and Mattila (2009) find that disaffected and less educated citizens have preferences both for stealth and direct democracy, whereas right-wingers prefer stealth and left-wingers direct democracy. What does the controversy between the normative ideals of deliberative democrats and the mixed empirical results that have been obtained among citizens mean in terms of democratic governance? The goal of this panel is to deepen the understanding of the associations between people’s democracy preferences, participation, and deliberation. We are interested in papers that address these fundamental questions by combining theoretical approaches with empirical data. Comparative and experimental papers are especially welcome.

Title	Details
Not Everyone’s Cup of Tea? How Preferences for Democratic Processes Shape the Willingness to Deliberate	View Paper Details
Preferences for Deliberative Democracy: Who does not want to Participate in Mini-publics?	View Paper Details
Hearing and Understanding the Other Side – Experimental Evidence on the Role of Empathy in Citizen Deliberation	View Paper Details
Anonymous Political Participation in the Form of e-petition Signing	View Paper Details