Creating and maintaining political trust among the citizenry is an essential task for modern democracies. Especially trust in the form of stable diffuse support is considered crucial as it enables governments to function efficiently by increasing deference and cooperation. The specific challenge hereby is that political decision making processes naturally benefit some to the disadvantage of others, thus creating winners and losers. If individuals evaluate political authorities and base their trust judgements solely on the evaluation of the outcomes of these decisions, a substantial amount of citizens would indeed lack support for political institutions and trust levels would vary dramatically from decision to decision. Subsequently the question arises, how to foster stable levels of political trust among both winners and losers of political decision making? The premises of procedural fairness theory become especially interesting in light of cross-national value shifts and changing citizenship norms as recently outlined by Dalton and Welzel (2015). Through rising levels of education and increased access to information a new generation of assertive citizens emerge which demand more influence in political procedures. In practice this would refer to stronger citizen involvement in political decision making, for instance through referenda or direct democracy elements. If citizens indeed care about procedures, democratic innovation might be a key to increase political support in Western democracies.
Procedural fairness theory receives a substantial amount of attention in organizational and socio-psychological literature where the existence of procedural fairness effects have been repeatedly shown in surveys, experiments and case studies. Within political science however, the majority of scholars still focuses on outcomes. Only few scholars tested this theory within a political framework. For instance, Esaiasson, Gilljam and Persson (2012) tested the impact of different procedures on decision acceptance in an experimental settings among adolescents and found that personal influence has a strong impact on legitimacy beliefs in a classroom setting. Yet, decisions in the political realm differ from decisions in such small, homogenous groups in two important ways. First, they address the allocation of scarce resources across a large heterogeneous and anonymous group. Therefore, the complexity of the decision-making issues are comparatively high. Second, there are substantially less face-to-face interactions between authority and affected individuals in political decision making than in small groups, such as classrooms. Further, the few existing studies yield ambiguous results about the existence and the conditions of procedural fairness effects to overcome dissatisfaction with decisions.
With this study we aim at complementing existing research by testing procedural fairness theory in an experimental setting with scenarios of realistic political decision making within heterogeneous groups. We manipulate different modes of decision making, such as direct voting or deliberation, in heterogeneous groups regarding a national budgeting decision and examine the potential effects on fairness perceptions for winners and losers of the decision. Further, drawing on Dalton & Welzel’s (2015) rationale of rising expectations, the moderating role of individual democratic expectations is assessed.
