Democracy Innovated by ICT Support and More Participation: How We Can Connect Citizens and Government Effectively in Digital Times, and Create Trust, and Legitimacy

This paper is part of a project that analyzes whether and how a political decision making process supported by an e-democracy platform, (e.g. Agora) has an influence on trust, and on legitimacy. We address legitimacy via subjective legitimacy beliefs (measured indirectly by gauging fairness assessments of the decision-making arrangement) and via satisfaction with the outcome. For measuring trust, we rely on an interdisciplinary model of trust concepts, including a general, an institutional, and an interpersonal perspective regarding trust. We expect that personal interaction in real world has a value on its own. We hypothesize that making augmented decision in public space by proving presence with the use of platforms such as Smart Agora, increases the feeling of belonging together (H1), or increases trust in each other (H2). At the same time, we hypothesize that the feeling of belonging together, also increases responsibility, and thus legitimacy of a policy decision (H3). In order to test the hypotheses, we run surveys with an experimental design to test causally consequences of physical interaction.