Reinforcing the legitimacy of deliberative citizen forums: contingent views from outside the forum

To date, research on deliberative citizen forums (dCFs) has been flourishing, primarily with an emphasis on their abilities to produce both internally and externally desirable effects. Many deliberative democrats are in love with dCFs because they are supposed to improve the quality of today's eroded democracy. At the same time, however, they are subject to major criticism. Not only would they be superfluous in certain circumstances, they may also decrease (rather than increase) the legitimacy of political decision-making. This article examines how non-participating citizens perceive dCFs. Drawing from a novel batch of conjoint experiments in both Germany and the United States of America it investigates the extent to as well as the circumstances under which different types of citizens perceive dCFs as legitimate means of governance. In doing so, it takes a bottom-up approach to perceived legitimacy, considering not only various design features of dCFs but also takes citizen heterogeneity and their awareness and experiences with dCFs into account. It argues that legitimacy perceptions of dCFs are ´contingent´, exhibiting legitimacy feelings for some but not all citizens.