How do Europeans Want Political Decisions to be Taken? Exploring Citizen Preferences and their Origins Across Different Contexts

Recent research has established relevant conclusions regarding how citizens want political decisions to be taken. The dimensionality of these citizen preferences and their relationship with relevant variables like education, ideology and trust have been examined. However, we still know very little about where these preferences come from. Do citizens build these preferences based on their own experience with different types of democratic processes? Based on values such as efficiency or responsiveness or based on the expected outcomes of each of them? Which are the underlying conditions for citizens to consider a decision-making procedure as being democratic? The European Social Survey 2012 module on Democracy, combined with the core module, represents an interesting material to explore such questions. The first section of our paper will present a general comparative overview of how several dimensions of the political process (deliberation, accountability, direct participation and responsiveness) are distributed in Europe and how they relate with the assessment of the country’s level of democracy (perceived level according to ESS data). The second part of our paper will focus on four of the countries included in the ESS, where previous research about this issue had already been developed: Finland, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. The paper will discuss the similarities and differences that these countries present in the patterns of how these democratic dimensions relate to the perceived assessment of the country’s level of democracy, based on the ESS data. The paper will end establishing a dialog with previous research from these countries.