Thursday Seminars by Ruben Van Severen

How Citizens View Alternatives to Representative Democracy

Abstract

This talk gives a broad overview of the research conducted within my PhD on how citizens view alternatives to representative democracy at a time of pervasive dissatisfaction with representative institutions. Such alternatives include models that increase the role of experts, models that strengthen citizen involvement through participatory practices, and, in some cases, models that imply a move away from democracy through support for autocratic leaders. The talk progresses from general to more specific contexts. It begins by examining how stable support for (representative) democracy is in times of crisis and whether such crises increase openness to alternative, non-democratic systems. It then turns to how citizens evaluate additions to representative democracy, such as participation tools like referendums and panels, and whether preferences shift when these tools are applied to ideologically polarized issues. The final part considers how these attitudes play out in practice in a concrete local setting in Belgium, with particular attention to the perspective of cynical citizens. Throughout the talk, special attention is given to both psychological explanations and contextual influences. I conclude by distilling three overarching lessons of the PhD and discussing what they reveal about citizens’ preferred ways of complementing representative democracy in the future.  

Bio

Dr. Ruben Van Severen is a political psychologist and postdoctoral researcher affiliated with both the Department of Social Psychology and the Department of Public Governance and Management at Ghent University. His research focuses on citizens’ preferences for alternative decision-making models beyond representative democracy. He investigates what these preferences entail, how they shift in response to societal times of crisis, and which psychological factors shape them, including political cynicism and ideological beliefs. 

Due to the interdisciplinary nature of his work, Ruben’s research has been published in journals such as the Policy Studies, Political Research Exchange, and Social Psychology, European Journal of Political Research, Government Information Quarterly. He is also part of a large-scale project in Flanders on local democratic innovations (https://participatievedemocratie.be/en/).