Commenting on Deliberation: Online Legitimacy Evaluations About a Dutch National Climate Assembly

Mini-publics are increasingly promoted as instruments of democratic renewal in political contexts marked by polarisation, disinformation, and declining political trust. Their democratic legitimacy is usually assessed by scholars through design features, process quality, and institutional follow-up. However, far less is known about how real-life mini-publics are evaluated by citizens who do not participate directly. This gap matters because most citizens encounter mini-publics through mediated communication, especially in digital environments where public interpretations of such a process are formed and contested. This paper examines how citizens evaluate the democratic legitimacy of a nationally organised climate mini-public in the Netherlands. It focuses on online public comment spaces responding to news coverage of the process. Rather than treating comment sections as representative samples, this study conceptualises them as arenas of public meaning-making. In these spaces, broader narratives about democratic innovations are articulated by non-participating citizens. Empirically, the study analyses a multi-platform corpus of public comments linked to media reporting across key moments in the life cycle of the Dutch climate assembly. The public comments are collected across three phases of the process: the announcement of the climate assembly, debates surrounding recruitment and deliberation, and political reactions to the climate assembly’s recommendations and subsequent political responses. The dataset includes comment sections from major Dutch news outlets, as well as relevant social media discussions. Analytically, the paper applies the commonly used input, throughput, and output legitimacy framework. This framework is used to map evaluations of inclusion and representation, procedural quality, and the perceived effectiveness and political uptake of outcomes. Deductive coding is combined with supervised classification to assess the prevalence and co-occurrence of legitimacy evaluations. Topic discovery methods identify recurring interpretive narratives. An inductive analytical phase further captures legitimacy evaluations that extend beyond the established framework. The paper contributes to the literature on democratic innovations in three ways. First, it shifts attention away from the often used controlled experimental settings among the general public and participant-focused assessments of mini-publics. Instead, it examines contested digital spaces where the legitimacy of mini-publics is publicly negotiated by non-participating citizens. Second, it provides empirical insight into whether, and how, real-life mini-publics resonate with the broader public when encountered through mediated communication. Third, it offers practical implications for the design and public communication of mini-publics in polarised and digitalised political environments. Together, the findings clarify the conditions under which democratic innovations remain resilient when subjected to public scrutiny beyond the deliberative arena.