Building Political Trust with Digital Democratic Innovations

Digital Democratic Innovations (DDIs) have largely been seen by the academic community as a possible solution to the crisis of representative democracy. Unlike non-digital Democratic Innovations (DIs), DDIs can transcend the physical borders to citizen participation and help create wider access to information and collaboration. There is also a hope that DDIs (and DIs) could help nurture political trust in governing institutions. Yet the vast majority of research on political trust and democratic innovations focuses only on one side of trust – the trust of citizens vis-à-vis government and its practices. What has largely been ignored, however, is the trust of actual decision makers towards citizen participation and its outcomes. We conceive of trust as a two-sided relationship that implies reciprocity. Therefore, when it comes to DDIs, citizens’ trust should not be the only one that matters. It is crucial that decision-makers also have trust in democratic innovations and in the common citizens’ abilities to generate valuable political suggestions. If political decision-makers do not trust citizens and processes of DDIs, then they also won’t trust and implement recommendations generated by them. Therefore, we claim that it is necessary to design DDIs in such a way that they generate political trust from both common citizens and decision makers – citizens must trust institutions and processes designed by the ones in power, and public officials must trust the input of citizens’ participatory processes. In this paper, we argue that transparency is a crucial element which ensures that DDIs generate reciprocal political trust. In order to achieve transparency, all processes surrounding DDIs should be clear and understandable, the platform itself should be user-friendly, engaging and accessible, and both citizens and decision-makers should be involved with the procedure of designing and implementing DDIs as much as possible. Trust is built through experiences, and therefore we believe that being exposed to transparent DDI procedures can enhance relationship of trust between decision-makers and citizens.