Do Election Rules Affect Deliberation? An Experiment on Deliberative Election Rules and Group Trust

28 Pages Posted: 22 Jan 2013

See all articles by Julie Nielsen

Julie Nielsen

University of Copenhagen - Department of Political Science

Marlene Wind

University of Copenhagen

Date Written: January 21, 2013

Abstract

Enhanced deliberation has been prescribed as the way forward to improve democratic decision-making, while generating positive attributes like trust and legitimacy. Yet, we do not know to what extent different decision-making election rules affect the deliberative process and its outcome. This article investigates to what extent different election rules in deliberative decision-making affect group trust by testing three ideal types of election rules (i.e. a dictator election rule, a representative election rule and a consensus rule) in a laboratory experiment. The findings show that the differences in election rules have a significant impact on the level of trust after deliberation. Interestingly, however, we find that the election rule of representative democracy yield more group trust than does the election rule of pure consensus and non-hierarchical decision-making. Thus our findings challenge the understanding by deliberative normative theorists that the more inclusion and consensus in the decision-making procedure the more trust and legitimacy amongst its participants.

Keywords: deliberation, election rules, trust game, decision-making processes, experiments, voting

Suggested Citation

Nielsen, Julie and Wind, Marlene, Do Election Rules Affect Deliberation? An Experiment on Deliberative Election Rules and Group Trust (January 21, 2013). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2204355 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2204355

Julie Nielsen (Contact Author)

University of Copenhagen - Department of Political Science ( email )

Denmark

Marlene Wind

University of Copenhagen ( email )

Øster Farimagsgade 5, University of Copenhagen
iCourts - Faculty of law, Uni of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, DK-1040
Denmark

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