The Double Role of Ideology – Disentangling Ideal-Based and Instrumental Support for DMPs Among Politicians

Deliberative events, such as citizen assemblies, are increasingly used in Western democracies (OECD 2023), particularly in climate and environmental politics (Boswell 2023). Their appeal can be both normative and instrumental, offering potential solutions to democratic challenges like incrementalism, depoliticization, and constrained political imagination (Marquardt et al. 2025). Of course, a big part of this depends on institutional buy-in and support from politicians. However, our understanding of how political elites use such institutions is limited. Recent research suggests that politicians’ support for DMPs is strongly shaped by party affiliation and political ideology, with socialist and green parties generally more open to such innovations (Junius et al. 2020). This openness is likely rooted in their normative commitment to participatory democracy but may also be driven by the typically green and progressive outputs of DMPs. Thus, the effect ideology may reflect both democratic values and issue-positional strategic expectations. Current literature has yet to fully disentangle this dual role of ideology. In a survey experiment, fielded to a panel of local politicians in Sweden (N = 1000), I will try disentangle this by treating the typical expected policy output of citizen assemblies (either in favour of increased public subsidies to public transport or not). I further measure party ID, political ideology, general process preferences, and the respondents' opinion on that policy issue (public subsidies to public transport) pre-treatment. By matching the pre-treatment policy opinion with the treatments, I can create an outcome favourability variable to test whether politicians' support for deliberative events is in any way instrumental or not.