What Drives High-Quality Civic Engagement? Online Experimental Evidence

• In Event: Reimagining Democracy: Politics and New Technologies

Abstract

How do governments and communities incentivize people to make good collective decisions? Increasing participation is an important goal for democracy in offline and online settings. Our study moves beyond studying raw turnout and explores which incentives encourage more thoughtful and informed voting – a question central to study of politics but only recently, with advances in tech, possible to experimentally test at scale. Studying a sample of governance representatives in a large web3 platform, we randomize interventions aimed at increasing the subsequent quality of participation, for example making voters’ jobs easier by providing an LLM to summarize vote proposals, or attaching a reputation score based on peer attestations.

Authors

• Andrew B Hall, Stanford University

• Eliza Riley Oak, Yale University