Increased involvement of citizens in political decision making is frequently put forward as a solution to tackle apparent legitimacy deficits in established democracies. A popular approach to following up on this suggestion is the organization of small scale assemblies where a fraction of the citizenry comes together, debates on a certain issue and develops proposals or recommendations for decision making.
The goal of the present project is to study citizens attitudes towards such small scale participatory processes. We are especially interested if and how such small scale processes can foster legitimacy among the broader public that was not personally involved in the process. As Mark Warren (2009) has recently pointed out, these forums can be considered as new forms of representation. Here, instead of being represented by professional politicians, citizens are represented by other citizens. In the empirical study of participatory process this approach has however remained understudied.
In our study, we want to investigate under which conditions of representation citizens perceive such processes as legitimate and feel represented by the participating citizens.
To this end we draw on Pitkins' (1967) distinction between different forms of representation, particularly descriptive, symbolic and substantive representation. We design short scenarios where we vary the degree of representation on these three notions and test their importance for citizens legitimacy perceptions.
