Reimagining Governance on Mars and Earth: How Citizens Envision Future Institutional Designs

Growing citizen dissatisfaction with current governance raises the question of what future governance systems should look like. We conducted a large survey experiment in the United States and Germany, with 5,000 respondents each, to explore how citizens would design their ideal governance system. We focus on two scenarios: a utopian Mars setting, in which citizens were asked to design governance from scratch, and an Earth setting, in which citizens were asked to redesign the existing governance system they live in. On the basis of a constant sum and conjoint analysis, we find a strong preference for mixed and “multicameral” (McKay, 2025) governance models that distribute decision-making among multiple actors. In the Mars scenario, citizens slightly “de-center” the representative model in favor of a greater emphasis on participatory and expertocratic components. There is also an even more pronounced preference for strong oversight. Our findings suggest that citizens' ideal governance preferences differ greatly from the current institutional status quo in both countries. Despite current authoritarian trends, citizens favor a system of governance based on institutional cooperation and robust checks and balances.