Affiliation:
1. Political Science Department (Media, Movements and Politics; M²P) University of Antwerp Antwerp Belgium
2. School of Public Administration University of Gothenburg Sweden
3. Centre for Political Research KU Leuven Belgium
Abstract
AbstractThis article explores how citizens’ legitimacy perceptions are affected when decision makers deviate from the recommendations of a deliberative mini‐public (DMP), and what can be done to mitigate negative consequences. The results of a preregistered vignette experiment in Belgium (N = 2659) support our two main expectations. First, citizens’ legitimacy perceptions decrease when politicians do not follow the outcome of a DMP. Second, when politicians communicate responsively about this – meaning that they show respect for the recommendations and publicly justify why they deviated from them – legitimacy perceptions substantially increase, generally reaching the level of those cases where recommendations are followed. Diving deeper into this result also shows that for this effect to occur, citizens must find the provided reasoning valid and acceptable. Finally, the results hold among both policy winners and policy losers. These findings have implications for the literature on democratic innovations, empirical legitimacy, and political representation, but also for policymakers striving to combine arrangements of public participation that go beyond triviality, with political responsibility for the whole, and sustained mechanisms for accountability.