Participatory Reforms to Elections: Findings of a Field-Experiment testing Enhanced Policy Voting (EPV)

The existing mechanism dominated by parties and elections to facilitate democratic rule is in crisis. Merely choosing between different candidates or parties and their policy-programs every few years isn’t in line with citizens’ process-preferences, many citizens prefer more participatory will-formation and decision-making processes; moreover, with diversifying societies, existing electoral mechanisms are increasingly unable to accurately capture citizens’ policy-preferences. Various potential cures have been developed and examined to address diagnosed symptoms of a crisis. For a long time, in democratic theory and equally in empirical studies, the focus of such efforts has been on participatory processes that establish additional will-formation and decision-making processes alongside existing representative ones. How to purposefully embed such processes within a political system that is until now dominated by representative processes remains a research gap. A different approach to making the political system more participatory is to democratize existing representative processes – instead of simply adding participatory procedures. In the paper, I follow latter approach and discuss the benefits of participatory reforms to elections. Specifically, I empirically evaluate the recently developed ‘enhanced policy voting’ (EPV). The EPV is characterized by, first, citizens voting exclusively on policy programs. Second, the voting act itself is enhanced; i.e. instead of having one vote to choose between policy programs as a whole, citizens may modify the policy-bundles using cumulative-voting and cross-voting. The EPV was tested in a field-experiment conducted in cooperation with a municipality in Germany in 2017. Over 800 citizens participated. Drawing upon the data generated in the field-experiment, I will answer: 1. Is the EPV in line with citizens’ process-preferences? 2. Do voting-results using the EPV capture citizens’ policy-preferences more precisely than voting-results of existing elections? Based on the findings, I will discuss the prospect of participatory reforms that strengthen the policy-dimension of elections in future conceptions of democracy.