Designing Democracy on ´Mars´ and ´Earth´: Exploring Citizens´ Democratic Preferences in a Deliberative and Co-Creative Design

Introduction

DDME sets up a bottom-up, co-creative, and deliberative design to obtain a deeper understanding of citizens' democratic preferences in two Western countries (Germany and the United States) and one non-Western country (India).

Democratic Preferences

Democratic preferences contain procedural preferences for different governance modes such as:

• Participatory
• Delegative
• Consensual
• Majoritarian forms of democratic governance

Additionally, they include preferences for democratic goals and values, such as equality or social justice.

Exploration of Ideal Democracy

Based on input and feedback from democratic theorists, DDME explores how citizens imagine ideal democracy (on Mars) and mend real democracy (i.e., how they would reform the political systems they live in (on Earth)). This exploration occurs when citizens have the chance to deliberate, weighing reasons regarding the pros and cons of various conceptions and schemes of democracy in a dialogical setting with their fellow citizens.

Deliberative Field Experiments

The deliberative field experiments will comprise 600-900 representative or maximally diverse citizens and will be run on a hybrid platform combining synchronous and asynchronous modes of interaction.

Analysis of Democratic Preferences

DDME analyses which factors drive different democratic preferences of citizens in the three different countries and which principles and arguments play a role in the opinion and preference formation of citizens' democratic preferences, with a specific focus on opinion and preference change.

Innovative Approach

The project is the first to delegate democratic designing to citizens, adopting a systematic and global approach where citizens, together with democratic theorists, think through advanced theoretical inputs and creatively consider optimal democratic designs.