CP09: Participation and Citizenship

High electoral turnout in countries with compulsory voting systems is often attributed to citizens' desire to avoid the legal consequences for abstention. However, turnout is also much higher in compulsory voting contexts where penalties are absent or unenforced, which challenges this notion. An alternative perspective suggests that citizens’ lack of knowledge about enforcement drives turnout, but little is known about the causal effect of such knowledge. This study examines whether knowledge of compulsory voting rules and their (lack of) enforcement influences turnout likelihood. To do so, we focus on Belgium, a country with a long history of compulsory voting – including high levels of turnout – but without enforcement of the legal consequences for abstention. We conduct a vignette survey experiment to analyse how factual information about compulsory voting, potential penalties for abstention, and the absence of enforcement of these penalties influences citizens’ likelihood of voting in future elections. By examining how knowledge of compulsory voting rules influences electoral participation, this research deepens our understanding of the effects of such rules on turnout in democratic systems.

The advantages and disadvantages of different democratic constitutions, or institutional set-ups, are much discussed in comparative politics. But what do citizens think about the choice of institutional parameters for democratic decision-making? Are their “process preferences” consistent with the political system they live in? Or are they willing to consider alternatives to it? This paper draws on a preregistered conjoint survey experiment to elicit citizens’ preferences over institutional design in Germany and the United States. Drawing on Lijphart’s typology of democratic institutions, our vignettes include information about the majoritarian or consensus-oriented character of institutions, presidentialism, judicial review and constitutional rigidity as well as democratic innovation like direct democracy and sortition-based citizen participation.

In preliminary analyses of the US data, we find a strong status quo bias in citizen preferences for the institutional design. Americans prefer presidential democracies with constitutional rigidity, judicial review, representation of interests in legislatures rather than citizen forums, and the electoral systems to be majoritarian rather than proportional. Only in the case of direct democracy, citizens show a preference for policymaking through referenda rather than legislatures. 

Calls to strengthen civic education often rest on the belief that robust instruction can restore the health of liberal democracy. Yet the assumption that civic curricula produces tolerant, informed, and participatory citizens remains underexamined. Using cross-national data from the 2022 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS), this paper investigates what kinds of civic education foster democratic dispositions among adolescents. I distinguish between fact-based, values-based, and participatory approaches to civic instruction and assess their relationships to students’ civic knowledge, tolerance, engagement, and identity. Analysis shows knowledge-oriented curricula alone have limited effects, while participatory and discussion-based approaches are more strongly associated with democratic attitudes and inclusivity. These results call for renewed theoretical attention to how civic education operates—not simply as content delivery, but as a formative practice linking cognition, values, and participation. By interrogating the supposed “restorative power” of civic education, the paper clarifies what kinds of pedagogical investments matter for sustaining liberal democracy.

How do citizens define democracy in their own words? While this question is central to understanding recent challenges to democracy, surprisingly little research has explored how citizens themselves articulate their definitions of democracy when asked openly. We address this gap using data from representative population samples in 14 countries. Developing fine-tuned large language models, we categorize and analyze more than 50,000 open-ended survey responses. We find that, across countries, citizens most commonly associate democracy with vague notions of "freedom''. Far less frequently do they offer multidimensional definitions that include electoral or liberal components of democracy. The most striking divide emerges between far-right voters and the rest of the electorate: far-right supporters tend to provide one-dimensional definitions centered on "winner-takes-all" ideas and disregard egalitarian foundations of democracy. Our findings thus offer clear evidence that, while citizens may express support for various democratic principles when prompted, they do not spontaneously conceive of democracy in multidimensional terms - particularly not in ways that include liberal elements.