Policy Preferences, Process Preferences, and Internal Efficacy: An Experimental Approach to Assessing Program Voting Procedures

In recent years deliberative procedures have dominated the strand of democratic innovations literature (cf. panel 7). So far, studies on deliberative democracy provided several insights about the behavior of participants, group dynamics, outcomes of deliberative procedures, or the specific design of a procedure (e.g., Grönlund/Bächtiger/Setälä 2014; List/Luskin/Fishkin/McLean 2013; Strandberg 2015). While these experiments greatly help enhancing our knowledge on deliberative procedures, less is known about procedures with a potential of direct self-government on a large scale. More precisely, what are the specific effects of different direct democratic procedures and what determines different procedures’ outcomes? I seek to partially close this research gap by testing with an experiment the effects of three different direct democratic voting procedures. The three procedures allow citizens to vote on policy programs of parties. The procedures vary in regard to the degree of influence on the composition of the policy programs provided – e.g. allowing voters to rank policies or select policies of different programs – and differing ballot layouts. The effects of the different degree of influence for citizens and the different ballot designs are analyzed in three dimensions: 1. The ability of a procedure to accurately capture citizens’ policy preferences, 2. the congruence of citizens’ process preferences with a procedure, and 3. the effects of a procedure on citizens’ internal efficacy. The paper describes two different experimental designs for a laboratory in the field and an online experiment. Both experiments will be conducted in cooperation with a municipality in Germany; 300 subjects participate in the laboratory, and 3000 subjects in the online experiment. The paper explains in detail the recruitment processes of the subjects, the stages of the experiments, and the data sources used. Subsequently, I will outline the methods for analyzing the data collected in order to generate insights regarding the voting procedures’ performance in capturing participants’ preferences accurately, their congruence with participants’ process preferences, and their effects on internal efficacy. I conclude the paper by providing an outlook on how the experiments’ results can tie in with various ongoing discussions among political scientists: The findings will contribute to the debate on stealth democracy, or the controversy about whether parties are (still) able to act as a link between the state and the citizenry. Moreover, the experiments contribute to designing innovative participatory procedures that translate citizens’ policy preferences into the political system and are in line with citizens’ process preferences – i.e. searching for cures of the democratic malaise.