Institutional Design Preferences among German and US Citizens

• In Event: Conceptions of Democracy among German and American Citizens and Political Elites

Abstract

How do institutional parameters of representative political systems affect citizens’ evaluations of these systems as democratic and effective? And in how far does the institutional design of representative democracies cohere with or diverge from citizen preferences? Attitudes to existing representative institutional orders are mostly studied only in terms of support, not with a view to preferences for alternatives. At the same time, the literature on democratic innovations mostly views them as additions to existing institutions and remains silent on alternatives to legacy institutions. Against this background, our paper uses data from a factorial survey conducted both via the GESIS Panel and the Understanding America Study to explore and compare citizens’ institutional design preferences in Germany and the US. We test hypotheses on the role of political socialization, party affiliation and the moderating effect of normative conceptions of democracy on citizens’ evaluations of hypothetical political systems as democratic and effective. Our findings show that a high degree of citizen involvement, a deliberative mode of decision-making, delegate representation and judicial review lead to more positive evaluations. While in Germany, we also find meaningful differences for party affiliation and moderation effects of normative conceptions of democracy, findings are less straightforward in the US. In our conclusion, we argue that the lower structuring of process preferences in the US could be due to the increasing absence of constitutional discourse in the country.

Authors

• Christopher Ojeda, University of California, Merced

• Lea Stallbaum, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz