They only like citizen involvement if they win! Disentangling instrumental and egalitarian motivations to support participatory procedures

Citizen involvement in political decision making has been repeatedly proposed as the solution to an apparent legitimacy deficit in established democracies. Yet despite the rich theoretical literature on participatory and deliberative democracy, knowledge about how people actually think about these procedures and who supports citizen involvement is still scarce and inconsistent (Bengtsson & Mattila, 2009; Webb, 2013; Neblo et al, 2010; Bowler et al, 2017). Two competing hypotheses exist. As Dalton and Welzel (2014) have argued, a global shift towards assertive citizenship leads to growing demands for citizen involvement among the highly interested and educated individuals that hold emancipative values. Accordingly, citizens call for more inclusive and egalitarian decision making procedures. Scholars of populism and stealth democratic attitudes, however, claim that support for more citizen involvement – often in the shape of direct democratic elements – is first and foremost a sign of protest and thus simply a means towards an end unrelated of one’s normative expectations of a political system. The former assumes an egalitarian motivation which results in an actual desire for more egalitarian procedures that give all citizens a say. The latter assumes a more instrumental motivation as participatory procedures as a mean to an end – either to protest against elites or increase the likelihood of favorable outcomes. Accordingly the expectation of “winning” should foster support for citizen involvement among the instrumentally motivated – illustrated by the often stated assumption: populists only like direct democracy if they win. Existing research that uses common measures of stealth or sunshine democracy cannot disentangle which individuals really hold a desire for a more egalitarian process or whether they would regard participatory procedures simply as a means to the end of more favorable outcomes. Therefore we study both existing cross-national survey data and self-collected survey data from the Netherlands to identify different motivations to support more citizen involvement based on individual values and perceptions of likelihood to win through these procedures. We contribute to the literature on process preferences by taking individual values – such as egalitarianism and social dominance orientation – and expectations of outcome favorability into account.