In Digital Platforms We Trust: Legitimacy Perceptions of a Digital Democratic Innovation and a Digital Vote Leaflet Created by Ordinary Citizens

How much information about the functioning of a (digital) democratic innovation is needed to accept its outcome and its process? Despite a lively theoretical discussion (e.g., Lafont 2020; Goodin and Spiekerman 2008), this question has rarely been examined empirically. In an upcoming and pre-registered field experiment taking place in the German-speaking part of Switzerland just before a Federal vote in March 2023, I will investigate the legitimacy perceptions of a vote leaflet produced by 1000 ordinary citizens in a real-world test of a new digital democratic innovation. The leaflet will be produced in a collaboration process on a self-developed, asynchronous digital platform featuring artificial facilitators and peer-review mechanisms. The legitimacy of this process and its outcome will then be assessed by about 1000 citizens in three assessment groups that have not produced the leaflet (two agency-recruited groups and a group of randomly selected citizens of a municipality in which the leaflet has been distributed before the vote). To learn whether better knowledge of the collaboration process indeed increases legitimacy and trustworthiness of the leaflet and the process, the amount of available information on the internal processes of the digital democratic innovation varies. A part of the members of the assessment groups will see a walkthrough video about the collaboration process on the digital platform and receive written information about the citizens who produced the leaflet, while the others will only receive the written information about the citizens who produced the leaflet without seeing the video. Since the video will allow a much deeper insight into the collaboration process, I predict that the citizens with access to the video will have a significantly more positive perception of legitimacy and trustworthiness of the digital democratic innovation. This result could put impetus on extensively providing process information or even creating a viewer status for non-participants during (digital) democratic innovations.