Theorizing the Role of Justifications in Creating Public Acceptance of Hard Decisions

In order to govern successfully, democratically elected leaders must assure that their decisions, policies, and laws are accepted, or at least tolerated, by most citizens. At the same time, elected leaders frequently have to make hard decisions are potentially controversial in the eyes of the public. How to generate legitimacy in the eyes of the public even in situations where legitimate interests are traded off lies at the heart of the modern democracy. During the last decades, the most popular recipe for generating public acceptance prescribed by both researchers and policymakers has been to impose various forms of democratic innovations, often inspired by participatory democracy. Although an attractive option because of their plea to public empowerment, these activities face well-known problems in that they carry the risk of violating democratic equality by giving certain groups or interests disproportionate influence, and in that that allow profound power to actors are not reachable for electoral accountability. In addition, their actual effects for short-and long-term public legitimacy and trust remains debated. In an attempt to contribute to the critical discussion on the great expectations of participatory innovations, we direct our attention to improvements or innovation of the democratic processes within the model of representative decision-making. Specifically, we focus on a surprisingly neglected aspect of democratic representation, namely post-decision justifications. Drawing on insights from democracy theorists as well as political psychologists, we theorize the role of justifications in creating public acceptance of contested decisions, and suggest an agenda for empirical research.