Can Direct Democracy Strengthen Democratic Legitimacy?

Direct democracy is often times seen as a solution to rising distrust in political parties and representative institutions in contemporary Western democracies. The underlying assumption here is that the legitimacy deficit citizens attest with regard to decisions made by representative actors can be counterbalanced by giving the demos a direct say in important decisions. Our paper empirically analyzes the related prospects of direct democratic reforms. Based on data from a large survey conducted in Germany in 2019 the paper measures the legitimacy deficit with regard to direct democracy perceived by German citizens. In addition, it evaluates a variety of possible confounding factors of this deficit. The first finding is that a large majority supports direct democracy as a decision tool on different levels of the federal system. This support is mostly independent from the individual sociodemographic background, i.e. neither education nor income have a strong impact on the desire for more direct participation in the political decision making process, only age has a slight effect. Given the fact, that direct democracy in Germany is only established on the local and the state level, this provokes a legitimacy deficit for the majority of the citizens. Interestingly the perceived deficit is not equally strong for all citizens; instead the data shows that for those citizens whose distrust in the representative institutions is high, the perceived deficit for direct democracy is especially strong. These findings suggest that the extension of direct democratic procedures might help to increase the legitimacy of democratic decisions perceived by the citizens especially with view to those citizens who are unsatisfied with the current representative system.