The Impact of Digital Democratic Innovations on Citizen Participation and Public Support for Local Democracy

Democratic systems are faced with an increasingly critical citizenry demanding more means of involvement in political decision-making (Dalton, 2004; Norris, 2011). This is particular pertinent on the local level where turnout and satisfaction tend to be lower than on the national level (van Deth, Tausendpfund, 2013). As a result, local government have long been experimenting with democratic innovations (Gabriel, Kersting, 2014; Kersting, Vetter, 2003). These include utilizing the affordances of information and communication technologies to enable participation independent of time and space. These top-down offers usually focus on consulting a self-selected public on local matters without any decision-making power. However, the evidence for the potential of public participation to contribute to the performance as well as the stability of democracy is mixed (Dietz, Stern, 2008), in particular when it comes to evaluating the impact of more recent forms of political online participation (Geissel, Newton, 2012; Kubicek, Aichholzer, 2016). In this regard our paper investigates three key questions: 1. Who is mobilized through local online participation? 2. What effects has online participation on the attitudes of citizens, in particular regarding the legitimacy evaluations of local politics? 3. Which factors influence the effects of online participation on mobilization and legitimacy beliefs? We improve upon previous research efforts by conducting a comparative study of three nearly identical online consultations in three German cities and using representative surveys of the local population to elicit views from both participants and non-participants. Specifically, in collaboration with the local councils of Bonn, Cologne and Moers we conducted online consultations on how to improve the local cycling infrastructure in which citizens made several thousand suggestions and comments. Using paper-based random-sampling surveys in the three cities we aimed to establish the publics’ attitudes on democracy in general (using the Democracy Barometer of the ESS Round 6), their assessment of local institutions and their evaluation of the consultation process itself - and how these might or might not change depending on knowledge of or participation in the online consultation. Based on more than 2.000 questionnaires from citizens, our results confirm the strong public demand for involvement in political decision-making and that online participation – also on the local level - exhibits stronger socioeconomic bias towards high-status individuals. We can show that participatory processes have a significant and independent effect on citizens’ attitudes towards local politics and administration and that such evaluations are mainly dependent on outcome and impact expectations. We also discuss factors including both process as well as context characteristics that are responsible for the variation in the findings between the three city case studies, in order to shed light on the complex interplay of factors that is not yet well understood (Kochskämper et al., 2018).