Democratic Innovations and Perceived Legitimacy: Theoretical and Empirical Connections

The use of democratic innovations has expanded vastly during the last decades (Font et al., 2014; Röcke, 2014; Smith and Wales, 2000). In an era of declining voter turnouts and confidence in representative institutions (Dalton, 2004; Norris, 2011) the potential of democratic innovations to cure democratic deficits receives a lot of scholarly attention (Geissel and Newton, 2012; Smith, 2009; Pateman, 2012; Warren, 2009). This paper asks whether the availability of participatory innovations fosters legitimacy in traditionally representative and old democracies like the Nordic countries. Democratic system requires a certain level of legitimacy beliefs among its citizens to implement decisions effectively (Easton, 1975). This paper conceptualizes two different causal mechanisms how democratic innovations can affect perceived legitimacy at the system level. The first is mediated by the responsiveness of the political system which forms the basis of citizens’ evaluations of government performance (Morlino, 2009). Second, the use of democratic innovations has an independent effect on perceived legitimacy based on procedural justice because citizens also value how fairly the procedures treat citizens and enable participation in decision-making (Levi et al., 2009). The survey data used in this paper consist of 9603 individuals in 34 Finnish municipalities. Due to the hierarchical structure of the data, multilevel regression modeling is used (Snijders and Bosker, 2012). In addition to the dependent variables (perceived legitimacy) and main independent variables (use of participatory innovations) standard individual and municipality level controls are used. The preliminary results suggest that the number of participatory innovations has a positive but not significant impact on perceived legitimacy, whereas population size is strongly and negatively associated to the level of legitimacy. The analyses will however be deepened by distinguishing different types of participatory innovations and the two types of perceived legitimacy outlined above – i.e. output and input legitimacy (Scharpf, 1999).