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Project

The black box of preferences for political decision-making processes: who want to innovate within democracies and why?

Democratic innovations have been largely proposed as procedures with which address the democratic legitimacy deficit in advanced democracies. However, little is known empirically about the societal demand for these procedures. One of the objectives of this thesis is to open the black box of citizens’ process preferences in order to acquire knowledge on who and why some citizens demand participatory and deliberative reforms in order to improve the involvement of regular people in political decisions. I hypothesize that far from uniform, the demand of certain types of procedures should change depending on the values, knowledge, status and outcome preferences of distinct groups of citizens. Also, the role of parties as intermediate structure between decision-making bodies and the citizenry must be address: what should be and is their role within polities that adopt democratic innovations as decision-making procedures?

Date:8 Jan 2018 →  26 Nov 2018
Keywords:Democratic innovations, Direct democracy, Deliberative democracy, Process preferences, Decision-making process preferences
Disciplines:Other economics and business, Citizenship, immigration and political inequality, International and comparative politics, Multilevel governance, National politics, Political behaviour, Political organisations and institutions, Political theory and methodology, Public administration, Other political science
Project type:PhD project