Designing Future Governance on Mars and Earth – A Return to Ancient Athens?

Growing citizen dissatisfaction with current governance raises the question of what future governance systems should look like. We conducted a large survey experiment in the United States and Germany, with 5,000 respondents each, to explore how citizens would design their ideal governance system. We focus on two scenarios: a path-dependent scenario (the respondent's country; Earth) and a utopian 'blank slate' scenario (Mars). This comparison allows us to assess how citizens' preferences change when removed from the constraints of their current governance system, and provides a unique perspective for re-imagining future governance systems. To analyze citizens' governance preferences in these two scenarios, we use advanced survey techniques: a constant sum approach to capture general preferences for (mixed) governance systems (ranging from representative and participatory to expertocratic and assertive leadership models) and a conjoint experiment to examine issue-dependent preferences for decision making. Our preliminary results show that citizens in both contexts favor the involvement of multiple actors. On Earth, they largely adhere to representative systems with expert and participatory add-ons. On Mars, however, they show greater openness to "multi-cameral" governance, where different institutions (e.g., representative, direct-democratic, lottocratic, expertocratic) share decision-making responsibilities, echoing historical models such as ancient Athens.