Citizen Acceptance of Hard Decisions

Abstract

The success of modern democracies largely depends on their ability to generate legitimacy in the eyes of the public. At the same time, democratic representatives and public officials frequently have to make hard decisions where legitimate interests are traded against each other and there is no obvious right answer. The question of how to assure that decisions, policies, and laws are accepted—or at least tolerated—by most citizens lies at the heart of political science and engages a broad range of researchers interested in public trust, political psychology, democratic innovations, theories of representation, and deliberative theory. This panel seeks to combine papers sharing an interest in how citizens come to accept authoritative decisions. The papers discuss and compare the role of democratic innovations as well as more traditional tools of democratic representatives, and target pre-decision arrangements as well as post-decision-events. The aim is to spark a praxis-oriented discussion on facilitating and exacerbating factors when democratic governments search citizen acceptance of “hard” policy decisions.