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

Project description

Designing the future of democracy with citizens

The rise in citizens’ assemblies, juries, and panels in Europe has shown that the future design of democracy can be successfully realised from the bottom up and in close communication with the citizens. The EU-funded DDME project proposes an experimental, co-creative and deliberative design to obtain a deeper understanding of citizens’ democratic preferences. In a ‘Mars’ group and an ‘Earth’ group, representatively selected citizens from Germany, India and the United States will discuss online with democracy experts democratic values such as freedom, equality and social justice. The former group will have the task to design an ideal democracy, while the latter will be doing the same in the context of their own countries.

Objective

DDME sets up a bottom-up, co-creative and deliberative design to obtain a deeper understanding of citizens democratic preferences in two Western (Germany and United States) and one non-Western country (India). Democratic preferences contain procedural preferences for different governance modes such as participatory, delegative, consensual or majoritarian forms of democratic governance as well as preferences for democratic goals and values - such as equality or social justice. 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)) when they had the chance to deliberate, i.e. to weigh reasons regarding the pros and cons of the various conceptions and schemes of democracy in a dialogical setting with their fellow citizens. 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. 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 eye on opinion and preference change). 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 think creatively about optimal democratic designs.

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2021-ADG

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Host institution

UNIVERSITY OF STUTTGART
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 2 056 149,00
Address
KEPLERSTRASSE 7
70174 Stuttgart
Germany

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Region
Baden-Württemberg Stuttgart Stuttgart, Stadtkreis
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 2 056 149,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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