Pragmatic citizens A bottom-up perspective on participatory politics

Many citizens in western democracies are dissatisfied with the way politics works in their country. This so-called legitimacy deficit is considered a core challenge to democracy. A popular response to this problem is to give ordinary citizens a greater say in the making of political decisions. Specially the past decades have seen a renewed interest and expansion of such participatory processes, which can range from nationwide referendums to small-scale deliberative citizen assemblies. But can participatory processes indeed strengthen the legitimacy of political decisions? To gain insights into this question, this dissertation focused on the perspectives, perceptions and opinions of citizens.
Specifically, I studied both citizens’ preferences for participatory processes as well as the effects of these processes on perceived legitimacy. In doing so I focused specifically on understanding why these processes would be appealing for citizens. What is in it for them? To this end, this thesis combined social psychological theories about procedural fairness with participatory and deliberative democratic theory. Empirically, it includes the study of both large-scale participatory processes, such as referendums, and small-scale participatory processes, such as citizens' forums. A variety of study designs are employed, in particular large-scale surveys, survey-embedded experiments and in-depth interviews, to address the question from multiple perspectives.
The overarching conclusion of this dissertation is that citizens hold much more pragmatic views about participatory processes than previously known. They do not consider participatory processes as an all-encompassing cure for democracy's ills but rather as a tool to solve specific problems with representative democracy. Yet, when these processes are employed to address such specific problems, they can have, albeit small, positive effects on perceived legitimacy.