Deliberating About Democracy on Mars

In light of increasing democratic discontent, multiple attempts have been made to understand what citizens want from democracy. This paper takes a novel approach of allowing citizens themselves to design ideal democracy within a systematic investigation. Within an asynchronous deliberative online forum, we asked 100 participants to design democracy on Mars (with an additional 150 participants serving as a control group and responding only to closed-ended pre- and post-surveys about ideal democracy). Based on a pre-survey and an information video, respondents were encouraged to think about novel governance designs, combining institutions, actors and practices from representative, participatory, expertocratic and AI-enhanced democracy. This allows us to explore citizens’ considered preferences and ideas on mixed or hybrid forms of democracy. By asking participants to design a democracy on Mars, we invoke thinking about “ideal democracy” without path-dependencies or restrictions. This paper first provides insight into respondents’ ideal-type thinking about democracy, focusing particularly on distribution of power and accountability mechanisms between representatives, citizens, experts and artificial intelligence. Additionally, we provide insight into how asynchronous deliberation led to more considered views, and changed participants’ views compared to a control group.