How Citizens Evaluate Participatory Mechanisms: A Conjoint Analysis

The literature on democratic innovations has proposed different criteria for evaluating the performance of different participatory innovations. Despite important differences, a common idea is that to evaluate the performance of participatory mechanisms, it is necessary to identify the design features that affect their positive or negative externalities. What remains unclear, however, is how citizens evaluate these different mechanisms. Studies show that people have consistent process preferences for political decision-making and that demand for more direct participation is widespread. However, while these studies show demand for new mechanisms of participation, it remains unclear what participatory mechanisms people would like to see introduced. To understand what kinds of participatory innovations it is that citizens want to see introduced, an important first step is to examine how the design features of participatory innovations affect citizens’ evaluations. This study contributes to this research agenda by examining how Finnish citizens evaluate central design features of participatory mechanisms in a conjoint experiment. This makes it possible to determine how characteristics of participatory processes affect citizens' evaluation of these processes and thereby establish what kind of participatory process citizens demand.