To be able to solve the increasingly complex problems, governments need to collaborate with various parties. This way of policy development is called interactive policy making. Citizen participation is a specific form of interactive policy making and focusses on involving citizens in the policy making process. A relatively new online participation method is Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE). It aims to facilitate mass citizen participation and to be inclusive. Everyone who wants to participate in the process should get the change to do so. At the same time PVE is an evaluation method for public policy. To be able to provide an accurate advice about the preferences of citizens regarding a set of policy options, the sample under study needs to be representative. Representativity and inclusivity seem to conflict with each other as making the research available for the public very often leads to a biased sample. The aim of this study is to examine the consequences of the trade-off between representativity and inclusivity for the usability of PVE in the policy context.