Research clusters

We explore citizens' understanding of democracy by asking open-ended questions, allowing them to describe what democracy means to them and avoiding the limitations of closed-ended questions based on predefined theoretical models. Additionally, we prompt citizens to envision new democracies on Earth and Mars, considering the constraints of the existing political systems and the freedom to conceive an ideal democracy without earthly parameters.

DDME aims to contribute to research on citizens' democratic preferences by investigating which models of democracy they prefer. Rather than choosing a singular type, we allow citizens to combine different models, blending elements from representative, participatory, technocratic, and executive Additionally, we connect decision-making preferences with principles, problems and views on civil society to gain a deeper understanding about the interplay between them to gain a deeper understanding of what democracy should look like in the 21st century. Finally, we prompt citizens to envision new democracies on Earth and Mars, considering the constraints of the existing political systems and the freedom to conceive an ideal democracy without earthly parameters.

DDME proposes a deliberative and co-creative approach that empowers citizens to collectively design democratic systems on Earth and Mars. Through a public experiment involving randomly selected citizens from Germany, the United States, and India, the hybrid platform enables asynchronous and synchronous interactions alongside input from democracy experts. This unique deliberative field experiment aims to generate new insights into the significance of information provision and deliberation for citizens' democratic preferences while fostering a more unified vision of the ideal model of democracy.

This research project explores citizens' perspectives on supranational democracy in Germany and France within the context of globalization. Participants are asked to choose between different models of international governance and the study investigates the conditions and constraints for citizens' willingness to transfer power to supranational levels. The project aims to assess the potential and limitations of achieving a more integrated and just democracy for Europe and the world.

This extension of the DDME project explores the democratic attitudes and preferences of young citizens. Researching their attitudes and preferences is important since young citizens form the next generation of democratic citizens. We investigate how young citizens think about politics and how they imagine their "ideal" democracy. The young citizens´ part of the DDME project collaborates with an interdisciplinary research team at the University of Stuttgart comprising sociologists and educational scholars and is supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of Baden-Württemberg, Germany.