In the eye of the maxi-public beholder: addressing democratic erosion via local participatory budgeting

Democratic innovations are often used by governments to address pressures of democratic erosion, amongst which are arguably deteriorating political attitudes of citizens in the maxi public. But whilst scholars often study whether democratic innovations affect citizens political attitudes, the exact reasons why this effect occurs remains especially in the context of the maxi public less well understood. In this paper, this gap in literature is addressed by inductively studying these reasons in relation to maxi-public levels of local political trust and external political efficacy. Based on a codebook thematic analysis approach to analyzing dozens of semi-structured interviews with citizens that live in three areas in the Netherlands were a local participatory budgeting took place, the preliminary findings not only provide novel insights into the embraced reasons and used discourse by citizens on why democratic innovations affect their political attitudes but also puts an emphasis on the heterogeneity and conditionality that characterize these mentioned reasons and utilized discourses by citizens. In turn, our results highlight a general need for the literature on democratic innovations to embrace a more nuanced reasoning when hypothesizing about the effects that a democratic innovation can have on maxi-public political attitudes. Such nuanced reasoning is needed because scholars will then be able to more accurately understand the potential of democratic innovations to counteract some of the pressures of democratic erosion that are arguably omnipresent in the West.