What young people want from democracy: A conjoint experiment on democratic designs with 15-year old pupils

Research on democratic preferences has barely focused on young people. This is especially true for pupils in school, who are yet to become democratic citizens. Regarding democratic attitudes, the controversial study by Foa and Munck (2016) – using data from the World Values Survey- claims that young adults in the U.S. and Europe are abandoning democracy as the key procedural value. The various refutations notwithstanding (e.g., Norris 2017; Wuttke et al. 2020) we argue that such traditional survey research on democratic preferences may tap into non-attitudes, requiring the adoption of more advanced methods, namely scenario designs including an information package (see Goldberg and Bächtiger 2022). By the same token, existing research on democratic preferences using scenario designs usually focuses on representative vs participatory forms of decision-making (Werner and Marien 2021), ignoring the fact that citizens (and pupils) may also favour “executive” forms of decision-making (whereas studies focusing on technocratic ´Stealth´ attitudes only use traditional survey techniques; Van der Molen 2017). To close these various research gaps, we perform a conjoint experiment with a large-scaled representative sample of approximately 2000 15-year old German pupils in Baden-Württemberg (conducted in February/March 2022) focusing on three forms of policy-making using a conjoint experiment: a representative mode in form of a parliament, a participatory approach in form of a citizen forum, and an executive model approach focusing on an assertive “leader”. The conjoint experiment contains further attributes, such a consultation with experts vs making decisions on their own, fast vs slow decision-making, various forms of authorization (including direct-democratic voting) as well as the winner/loser dimension. While we are interested in a global assessment which democratic modes are favoured by pupils, we also engage in subgroup analysis. We examine preferences of respondents contingent on their prior political dispositions (political sophistication or political trust) and psychological dispositions with a particular eye on depressive symptoms (Landwehr and Ojeda 2020), anxiety and threat-perceptions (Corona Pandemic, Climate Change, War). We expect that pupils with high levels of political sophistication prefer representative or participatory forms of policy-making, while pupils with populist attitudes and anxious pupils are more supportive of executive forms of policy-making.