This Process is Fair Because I Won: How Social Dominance Orientation Moderates the Potential of Citizen Involvement to Foster Democratic Legitimacy

A core challenge in democracy is to achieve consent from losers of political decision making. It has been shown repeatedly that losers are not only less satisfied with the outcome but also exert lower levels of legitimacy beliefs. Building on the procedural fairness framework, increased citizen involvement in political decision-making processes is often proposed as a way to mitigate the so called loser-effect. The general assumption is that individuals uniformly value citizen involvement and therefore involvement will increase perceptions of process legitimacy and consent with its outcomes. In this paper, we qualify this assumption of homogenous reactions to involvement. We argue that the extent to which citizen involvement can foster process legitimacy depends on if citizens actually value involvement in the first place. In particular, Involvement can strengthen process legitimacy among people with a low social dominance orientation who are more egalitarian oriented. Yet people with a strong social dominance orientation appreciate citizen involvement merely as a strategy to reach more favorable outcomes. If involvement does not lead to favorable outcome, its potential to strengthen process legitimacy is limited for this group of people. We conduct three vignette experiments and one panel study on a referendum in the Netherlands to put our theory to a test. We contribute to arriving at a more detailed understanding of the potential of citizen involvement to foster democratic legitimacy and urge scholars to take citizens’ values into account when studying the applicability of the procedural fairness framework in political decision making.