A Bottom-Up Perspective on Deliberative Participation Processes: What Citizens Want and How Expectations Might Affect Perceived Legitimacy

In deliberative democratic theory, democratic innovations such as deliberative participation processes are rumoured to increase the legitimacy of democratic decision-making processes and outcomes. However, we have surprisingly little knowledge on whether deliberative participation processes contribute to legitimacy from the perspective of the citizenry itself. In this paper, I will argue that legitimacy empirically depends on citizens perceptions of deliberative participation processes. With regard to deliberative participation processes, we do not know whether citizens would perceive the legitimacy gap raised by Lafont (2015) and which goals citizens would confer to them. While we already know quite a bit about citizens’ general democratic preferences, we know almost nothing about their preferences for this kind of specific governance scheme. Thus, I argue, that neither expectations on deliberative participation processes nor legitimacy are ‘unitary’ terms. With regard to expectations, the literature on deliberative democracy normatively shows different desired goals of deliberative participation processes such as inclusion, trust, acceptance, influence, social learning and epistemic better decisions. However, we do not really know what citizens actually expect from such processes in different contexts (e.g. issues). Assuming that citizens assess goals of deliberative democracy differently or even do not care of some of them personally, I will shed new light on the discussion about desired outcomes of deliberative participation processes. The goal of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it will contribute to the discussion on expectations in identifying and understanding different expectations on deliberative participation processes from a bottom-up perspective and secondly link them to perceived legitimacy. Drawing on a case study that differs between citizens expectations, I will propose potential linkages to how future research might evaluate legitimacy of deliberative processes not in a normative ‘unitary’ term but instead from the perspective of the citizenry itself.