Democratic Values in Citizen Participation: What Citizens Prioritize in Participation

ABSTRACT Citizen participation is often initiated to strengthen democracy. While participatory innovations are typically assessed through normative frameworks emphasizing democratic values, little is known about which of these values are prioritized by citizens. This research note presents findings from an original survey conducted in the Netherlands in 2024, investigating which democratic values citizens prioritize in the context of citizen participation. Drawing on Hendriks' (2022) democratic values typology including inclusiveness, process fairness, efficaciousness, resilience and counterbalance, we operationalize five value statements and asked respondents to rank them. Citizens most frequently prioritize efficacious outcomes and fair procedures, while inclusiveness, resilience, and counterbalance receive less emphasis. This pattern highlights the central role of both effective governance and procedural fairness in citizen participation. Value priorities nevertheless vary across citizens: inclusiveness, understood as the inclusion of diverse perspectives, is more strongly emphasized by left‐wing citizens, whereas counterbalance is primarily prioritized by politically dissatisfied citizens, but remains a lower overall priority. These findings offer an exploratory first step in linking normative frameworks on democratic values with how citizens themselves prioritize those values.