(When) Does Citizen Engagement affect Legitimacy? Evidence from a conjoint experiment

Citizen engagement has been praised for improving the quality of policy-making processes. It ranges from one-way written communication from citizens to politicians to more deliberate forms where citizens and policy-makers meet to discuss policy solutions. Apart from the format, the procedures also vary in terms of how popular they are among citizens and how much attention is paid to the views of the citizens participating. We argue that all these elements influence how legitimate citizens perceive an instance of citizen engagement in policy-making. Not only do we expect citizens to prefer citizen engagement to no citizen engagement. We also expect that they judge procedures more positively (1) the stronger the deliberative component of the consultation instrument, (2) the higher the number of citizens who participate, and (3) when the policy outcomes reflect the position of the citizens participating. We test these hypotheses through a survey experiment with a random sample of 3000 Danish citizens, who are presented with a description of a fictitious policy-making scenario. The conjoint design of the experiment allows us to identify the effects of a set of features of citizen engagement across various outcome scenarios.