FAQ

One central issue of various citizen participation approaches concerns the extent to which participants can be seen to represent “the public.” When there is a desire to include citizens that are interested, concerned and informed, this tends to require a substantial time commitment to build capacities of citizens which has the potential to lead to ‘participation fatigue’ and overrepresentation of citizens who either have a lot to gain by influencing decisions, have a lot of spare time and/or enjoy speaking in public. Various studies find that in conventional participation approaches white, middle aged, well-educated males are generally overrepresented.

A key benefit of PVE is that the entry barriers for participating are relatively low. Participants generally spend 20 to 30 minutes submitting their choices, and the respondents can choose themselves when and where they conduct the PVE. As a result of the low entry barriers not only the passionate proponents and opponents, but a more diverse set of citizens can participate in the evaluation of public policies. The sociodemographic characteristic of the respondents who participated in previous PVE studies reveals that all relevant segments of the population are represented to a fairly equal extent. The low barrier to participation in PVEs makes participation further accessible to a larger group of citizens (in some experiments 3,000 citizens participated).

A key strength of PVE is that the choices of the respondents are analyzed using econometric techniques which ensures that we can reweigh the outcomes of a PVE study when a certain segment of the population is underrepresented or overrepresented. 

Citizens further respond that participating in a PVE is a suitable way to get involved into policy-making and to ensure that their voices are heard. The role of citizens in current participation approaches is generally confined to responding to a plan designed by experts or policy makers. Some citizens experience this as an inferior role which evokes frustration. PVE might circumvent this issue as citizens are invited to make a strategic choice that mirrors the dilemma policy makers face. In a PVE, citizens are basically put in the shoes of a policy maker. Moreover, citizens who participated in previous PVEs argued that it raised their awareness concerning the dilemmas public bodies are faced. For instance, citizens learn about scarcity of public resources (not everything is possible) and the cons and pros of the alternative policy options.

One disadvantage compared to offline participation meetings such as town hall meetings is that you miss the face-to-face communication between people. We observe that people who do not have a lot of time and do not want to participate in front of other people have a demand for participating online through a PVE, but on the other side there are also individuals who prefer to participate in an offline setting in which they can exchange arguments face-to-face and deliberate with experts and civil servants. For this reason, we believe that online participation methods such as PVE should not replace offline participation but complement offline participation. Moreover, the desire among a segment of the population for offline participation can also be used as an argument to offer people the opportunity to fill-out a PVE offline at a meeting that is specifically organized for this purpose. 

First of all, PVE mimics the real choice situation of a policy maker which gives respondents a deeper sense of awareness and the opportunity to express a more nuanced opinion. A regular survey generally asks respondents to respond to a proposition (do you agree with this proposition yes or no). 
Moreover, PVEs are not designed to as tracking opinions at a given moment but as to track advice to ongoing policy proposals or strategic government decision. Hence, the formulation of the tradeoffs, the calculation and visualization of the possible way to go beyond polling, which in turn makes the quantitative and qualitative responses much more compelling and useful for governments and public administrations.
Lastly, PVE’s are designed in a way that includes a much stronger deliberative ideal and two-way communication than a survey does.

Particularly in western countries Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is the most widely used appraisal method supporting government decision-making. A CBA expresses the impacts of a government project in monetary metrics based on the number of euros individuals and parties are willing to pay from their private income. However, the ways in which individuals balance their own money against the attributes of government projects may be a poor proxy. The same individuals might value trade-offs in public budget and impacts of public projects quite differently. Hence, PVE gives individuals the opportunity to express a broader range of preferences concerning government policies. For instance, preferences of individuals who believe that government funds should be spend on different purposes than their own money can be expressed in PVEs and not in CBA. Values that are not traded in a real-life market setting such as freedom of choice, biodiversity or landscape for example, might be valued in the wrong way when they are have to be traded-off against private income.

First of all, policy makers can not only use the written motivations of participants for choosing each of the projects they selected for underpinning and communicating their decisions, but also tailor-make them for specific target groups. The results of a PVE can e.g. be refined for a selected neighborhood, age,- income group or education. Moreover, civil servants value that PVE is based on a rigorous theoretical framework (welfare economics). The theoretical framework ensures a clear interpretation of the results of a PVE.
PVE further provides a clear operationalization of citizen participation which contrasts existing approaches to citizen participation in which design choices are generally made in an ad hoc way.

Another advantage is that practitioners can re-calculate the outcome of a participation process when it turns out that the attributes changed along the way. For the Transport Authority Amsterdam for example it turned out after the PVE that the costs of one project were 8 million higher. In such a case, an analysts can redo the calculation of the choices that respondents made in the PVE using this new information. It is not necessary to consult citizens for another time to reveal their views in light of this new information.

Finally, civil servants valued the potential of PVE to foster integral thinking within their organization as well as a ‘desilofication’ of money allocation. Policy makers who commissioned the transport PVE particularly used the method for this purpose. More specifically, using the results of the PVE, the Transport Authority of Amsterdam (TAA) attempted to open up budgetary lines by arguing that money should be re-allocated between sub-departments (cycling, car) since this results in a better alignment of the portfolio of transport projects with citizens preferences.

PVE enables citizens to compare and choose between different policy options. As it proved, many citizens value to be involved in choices and trade-offs between possible alternatives of important government decisions, (which are often not debated during election campaigns). As we often hear from participants, PVE feels like to sit in a Ministers chair. Secondly, PVE is designed to bringing many, diverse and nuanced voices into being. All citizens have an equal voice (one-person-one-vote). That balances the often felt chaotic policy debates that are dominated by loud voices and extreme claims. Thirdly, the results of a PVE are operationalized in a manner, which allows a sophisticated recommendation of a policy-composition (maybe even one that did not existed before the experiment) that satisfies highest possible welfare in society. Thus, we hope that PVE helps to bridge the gap between what citizens want its government to do, and what government ultimately does.

PVE is already accessible for all people, but we strive to remove further language and complexity barriers. Therefore, we are working on several ends to improve the accessibility of PVEs and currently  conducting several tests for better visualization and user experience. It will be soon possible to switch a PVE into a foreign language or the simple language format. We have already created an improved system with information layers in order to integrate need for better accessibility for non-experts but at the same time stay close to the complexity of reality. This helps us also to be transparent about numbers and calculations and allows us to provide detailed information for citizen experts.

Yes, we have developed a mobile and tablet version.

PVE was not developed a for a specific target group, but the format fits well with the participation needs of many people who do not have that much time or do not like to express their opinion in front of other and/or engage in a public debate, but have the desire to express their preferences and give advice about public decisions. We have seen that we can reach an above average of young and female participants compared to more conventional participation methods.

The results of a PVE do not take over the role of politics. On the contrary, it enables politicians elected in a representative democracy to make better decisions (together with other stakeholders) based on citizens' preferences. During the elections, citizens vote for a political party, but it is highly questionable whether their vote during the elections reflects their preferences on a demarcated subject. The results of a PVE provide politicians with information about their preferences on a demarcated subject and they can use this information in forming their opinions.

PVE is a non-paternalistic analysis. The choices and preferences of individuals guide the conclusions that are drawn from a PVE. An argument against a non-paternalistic analysis is that the individuals participating in a PVE are lay people and that lay people sometimes have difficulty forming their preferences on a complex subject such as the choices that participants have to make in a PVE. From a paternalistic perspective, it would be better to leave the making of choices on complex subjects to experts (such as politicians). So, a politician is perfectly capable of saying: "a PVE is an excellent method to measure citizens' preferences on a topic, but I think we should not only base decisions on lay people's preferences on this type of complex topic, but also on experts' preferences on this topic, and these experts say that we should make different decisions. In this case, I'm following the advice of the experts." It also follows from the results of the PVEs carried out that most participants believe that decision-making should be based not only on the results of the PVE, but also on expert opinions. For instance, in a PVE that was carried out very recently in Utrecht only 14% of the citizens said that the outcome of the PVE should have more weight in the decision-making process than the recommendations of experts.