What Do Citizens Expect from Deliberative Forums? An Online Survey with a Preference Experiment

Research on deliberative forums has long focused on highlighting the pros and cons of such forums in actual policy-making and their role in improving democracy. Empirical literature has almost entirely concentrated on their internal aspects, such as social selective participation and the capacity of citizens to deliberate. In addition, the legitimacy of deliberative forums has been seriously questioned (Lafont) recently. However, what remains largely unexplored is the question of how non-participating citizens view such procedures. I argue that in order to assess the legitimacy of deliberative forums, subjective legitimacy perceptions of the citizens are central. To explore such legitimacy perceptions, I conduct an online survey with a conjoint experiment in Germany. I first take stock of citizens’ general preferences for deliberative decision-making and their specific expectations for such procedures. Then, I explore how they evaluate specific input-, throughput-, and output- design features of deliberative forums (such as recruitment, size, or decision-making rules). Moreover, I assume that most citizens know very little about such procedures. Thus, participants are randomly assigned to two groups. In the first group, participants receive pro- and con-arguments on deliberative forums in general and various design features. The second group does not receive such information. In this paper, I will present first results of this online survey.