What Do Politicians Think About Citizen Participation in Unpopular Decisions: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Unpopular local decisions—such as closing schools or locating contested facilities—pose a persistent challenge for representative democracy. Politicians are expected to reflect citizens’ preferences, yet they are also responsible for making decisions they consider necessary, even when these decisions lack public support. Citizen participation is often promoted as a way to improve decisions and strengthen legitimacy in such cases, but participation can also be demanding for politicians, particularly when it involves confrontation with mobilized and dissatisfied citizens. This raises a central question: under what conditions are politicians willing to engage in organized citizen participation when decisions are unpopular? This paper presents a vignette-based survey experiment conducted in the Norwegian Politician Panel. Elected municipal politicians are randomly assigned to scenarios that vary along five dimensions: the stage of the process (proposal versus decision), the type of issue (service cuts, burden siting, or neutral improvements), who is invited (all citizens or those directly affected), the purpose of the meeting (listening, explaining, or discussing), and the level of prior public mobilization. We examine how these features shape politicians’ willingness to attend such meetings, as well as their perceptions of discomfort, usefulness, and obligation, and their evaluations of whether citizens should be invited at all. By isolating how institutional design and political context affect politicians’ orientations toward participation, the experiment contributes to debates on representation and democratic innovations. It highlights how responsiveness, strategic considerations, normative expectations, and emotional costs jointly shape political engagement with citizens in the most contentious policy settings.