15:30 - 17:45
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Ana Weeks
Discussant/s:
Christopher Wratil
Meeting Room O

Ana Weeks, Hilde Coffé, Sparsha Saha
Quotas or Parity? How the Framing of Positive Action Measures Affects Public Legitimacy

Anne Rasmussen, Stefanie Reher
(When) Does Citizen Engagement affect the Legitimacy of Policy-making? Evidence from a conjoint experiment

Aliza Forman-Rabinovici, Itai Beeri
Connecting descriptive representation in elected bodies to citizen satisfaction with public services

Jae-Hee Jung
Voters' Preferences for Moral Representation

Zachary Greene, Lauren Toner
Observing more, but doing less? Evaluating voters’ attitudes towards intra-party deliberation using a conjoint survey experiment.
Observing more, but doing less? Evaluating voters’ attitudes towards intra-party deliberation using a conjoint survey experiment.
Zachary Greene, Lauren Toner
University of Strathclyde

Voters report greater satisfaction with democracy when they have greater influence in the selection of parties’ leadership and electoral candidates. However, recent changes to parties’ rules, driven in part by the global pandemic, likely impact party leaders’ approaches for managing intra-party groups and potentially limit the average members’ participation in consequential decisions. For example, in 2020, the major UK parties held their conferences online, in many cases, substantially limiting the number of speakers. This potentially tilted the influence away from ordinary, yet made it easier for the average person to watch proceedings. Timed with low participation costs, this change has increased opportunities for observation and transparency, while the diversity of participants in key roles has decreased. In this paper, we describe the results of a conjoint survey experiment intended to evaluate voter and party member attitudes towards these changes. In particular, we vary a series of reforms that relate to the costs of participation for members and the leaders’ ability to control the content of discussions through agenda setting procedures. We further provide varying information on the expected impact of these reforms for the role of individual party members on parties’ decision-making. The results of this experiment hold key implications for parties looking to reform internal institutions while maintaining and growing diverse party memberships.