Incivility, oversimplification, lying, inaccessible language: there is widespread concern and controversy about the disrespectful ways politicians communicate. The reasoning underlying these worries is that such communication violates widely shared communicative norms, and that exposure to it may lead to adverse consequences in the wider public. However, widespread support for respect-based norms among citizens is generally presupposed, and little is known about the extent to which norm support matters in how people react when witnessing disrespectful politicians. Using Belgian survey data (N = 2,030), we investigate whether citizens differ in the degree to which they support different respect-based norms for mediated elite communication, and whether differing levels of norm support moderate the relationship between perceived norm violations and several political outcomes (affect toward politicians; political trust; talking about politics; political information seeking). The results reveal substantial variation in norm support across the population, with differences based on sociodemographic characteristics (e.g., education level) and political attitudes (cynical, populist, polarized attitudes). This variation, moreover, matters. While depending on the outcome and norms we study, several findings show that citizens supporting respect-based norms react more negatively when perceiving norm violations more frequently, as compared to citizens caring less about these norms. Yet, whether and in what way this moderating effect occurs can differ for different types of disrespect. As such, besides showing that respectful communication is not equally important to everyone and that not everyone reacts to norm breaking in the same way, this study also underlines that not all shades of disrespect should be tarred with the same brush.

While ‘losers’ consent’ has long been recognized as crucial for democratic stability, recent concerns over elite manipulation of democratic processes highlight the need to shift focus to the responsibility of political winners. We argue that ‘winners’ restraint’ is equally indispensable, even in well-established democracies. Our study investigates the presence and boundaries of winners’ restraint, particularly in the realm of policy decisions. Through a survey and two experiments conducted in the UK, we examine the extent to which respondents tolerate accumulating procedural violations before dissenting. Our findings reveal that while citizens may initially overlook undemocratic behavior that aligns with their policy preferences, there are inherent limits to this tolerance. For a majority of respondents, winners’ restraint can be activated as violations accumulate, resulting in a withdrawal of perceived legitimacy. This underscores the critical role of winners in upholding democratic principles and resisting erosion of democratic norms.

Deliberative mini-publics are increasingly used to try to tackle public discontent with the functioning of democracy. However, the ability of mini-publics to increase perceptions of legitimate decision-making among citizens at large remains unclear, given especially that existing studies have not considered the potentially damaging effects of mini-public recommendations not being followed. We designed, pre-registered, and ran a survey experiment in Ireland to test the effects of mini-publics on legitimacy perceptions conditional on whether or not their non-binding policy recommendations are honored (N = 1309). We find that mini-publics increase legitimacy perceptions among the broader citizenry; however, these beneficial effects are largely limited to situations in which their recommendations are honored. Additional results suggest that it makes no difference whether mini-public recommendations are overturned by elected representatives or by citizens in a referendum. Finally, we find that the legitimacy-enhancing effects of participatory processes are driven by citizens with low political trust.

How do citizens react to repeated losses in politics? This paper argues that experiencing accumulated losses creates strong incentives to externalize responsibility for these losses to the decision-making procedure, which can, in turn, erode legitimacy perceptions among the public. Using a survey experiment ( N = 2,146) simulating accumulated losses in a series of direct votes among Irish citizens, we find that decision acceptance and the perceived legitimacy of the decision-making procedure diminish with every loss. Three accumulated losses depress the perceived legitimacy of the political system. These effects are mediated by procedural fairness perceptions, suggesting that even when democratic procedures are used, accumulated losses can induce a belief that the process and system are rigged.

Political representation does not function well for citizens whose positions on political issues differ from those of elected representatives. In this paper, we argue that opinion incongruence leads citizens to want to bypass elected representatives and place more decision-making power in the hands of the public. We theorise that this is because incongruent citizens are highly dissatisfied with the existing political system and/or think they will benefit from direct decision-making in terms of improved policy responsiveness. Using data from the 2019 Belgian Election Survey (n = 3413) and Party Leadership Survey, we find that greater incongruence between citizens' positions and those of their elected representatives is related to higher support for direct decision-making. This holds for opinion incongruence with the party voted for and incongruence with Parliament as a whole. This paper contributes novel insights into the consequences of the quality of political representation as well as the drivers of citizens' support for direct decision-making processes.

This article explores how citizens' legitimacy perceptions are affected when decision makers deviate from the recommendations of a deliberative mini-public (DMP), and what can be done to mitigate negative consequences. The results of a preregistered vignette experiment in Belgium (N = 2659) support our two main expectations. First, citizens' legitimacy perceptions decrease when politicians do not follow the outcome of a DMP. Second, when politicians communicate responsively about this - meaning that they show respect for the recommendations and publicly justify why they deviated from them - legitimacy perceptions substantially increase, generally reaching the level of those cases where recommendations are followed. Diving deeper into this result also shows that for this effect to occur, citizens must find the provided reasoning valid and acceptable. Finally, the results hold among both policy winners and policy losers. These findings have implications for the literature on democratic innovations, empirical legitimacy, and political representation, but also for policymakers striving to combine arrangements of public participation that go beyond triviality, with political responsibility for the whole, and sustained mechanisms for accountability.

Concerns about widespread democratic dissatisfaction have prompted a search for remedies, such as increasing citizens' role in politics. While the public seems supportive, it remains unclear whether such newly introduced procedures can effectively tackle citizens' dissatisfaction with present-day politics. This paper develops a problem-solving approach to studying this question. It proposes that combining insights on what 'pushes' and 'pulls' people to support procedural reform is crucial: Only then can we uncover if and how people consider procedural reform as addressing the problem(s) they see in the representative system today. Using the example of deliberative minipublics and original, pre-registered survey data from Belgium (n = 1,579), we find that respondents generally think of minipublics as problem-solvers rather than problem-creators, albeit to different degrees. For instance, this perceived problem-solving potential is more pronounced among discontent citizens. This study sheds new light on the importance of studying citizens' reasoning about the roots and remedies for political dissatisfaction.

AbstractThe potential for participatory processes to address deficits in perceptions of legitimacy is strongly debated. This letter discusses how to evaluate the effects of participatory procedures. It argues that participatory processes should not be compared to normative ideals about how citizens should behave, but rather to the status quo of representative decision making. The authors use the example of winner–loser gaps in perceptions of fairness to illustrate the importance of evaluation frameworks, drawing on twelve experiments from the Netherlands and Sweden (total N = 5,352). The study shows that the choice of benchmarks matters substantially for the interpretation of process effects. When comparing participatory processes to the status quo of representative decision making, it finds higher fairness perceptions for a participatory process than for a representative process across all twelve experiments, even when the outcomes are unfavourable.

Download This Paper Open PDF in Browser Add Paper to My Library Share: Permalink Using these links will ensure access to this page indefinitely Copy URL Copy DOI

Many deliberative democrats herald the potential of minipublics to help improve the quality of democratic decision-making. Yet these democratic innovations present a paradox: how can the use of minipublics be perceived as legitimate by the maxi-public when most citizens cannot participate? In this article, we address this question in the context of Lafont’s argument that minipublics amount to ‘shortcuts’ in the democratic process. We challenge this argument by hypothesising that non-participants perceive minipublics to be legitimate when they perceive minipublic participants to be like them – and when they perceive politicians to be unlike them. Similarly, we expect that the relative importance of descriptive similarity will be related to the issue in question. We test our hypotheses in the deeply divided context of Northern Ireland, where a minipublic was held on the salient and contentious question of the polity’s constitutional future. Survey evidence confirms that ‘like me’ perceptions constitute a significant predictor of minipublic legitimacy perceptions. Our results have implications for the communication of minipublic features to the broader public, for the use of minipublics alongside conventional decision-making processes, and for further empirical research.

Concerns are raised repeatedly about the quality of televised debates. Both a country's electoral system and the presence of populist candidates have been argued to influence the deliberative qualities of these debates. By using an extended version of the Discourse Quality Index, this study conducts a content analysis of 12 televised election debates in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom between 2009 and 2015. Against expectations, results show that politicians in multiparty systems do not justify their policy positions more and are not more respectful in the televised debates. Rather, this study uncovers a clear populist challenge to key deliberative debate qualities across party systems. Left- and right-wing populist politicians adopt more positions without proper justification, and the presence of right-wing populists in the televised debates increases the number of disrespectful interactions, lowering the deliberative qualities of the televised debates in different electoral contexts.

Drivers of Support for the Populist Radical Left and Populist Radical Right in Belgium This study investigates how protest attitudes and ideological considerations affected the 2019 election results in Belgium, and particularly the vote for the radical right-wing populist party Vlaams Belang (VB) and for the radical left-wing populist party Partij van de Arbeid-Parti du Travail de Belgique (PVDA-PTB). Our results confirm that both protest attitudes and ideological considerations play a role to distinguish radical populist voters from mainstream party voters in general. However, when opposed to their second-best choice, we show that particularly protest attitudes matter. Moreover, in comparing radical right- and left-wing populist voters, the article disentangles the respective weight of these drivers on the two ends of the political spectrum. Being able to portray itself as an alternative to mainstream can give these parties an edge among a certain category of voters, albeit this position is also difficult to hold in the long run.

A prominent explanation of widespread popular support for referendums is dissatisfaction with the functioning of representative democracy. In this article, the aim is to gain a better understanding of how dissatisfaction affects support for referendums. Drawing on previous research, it is argued here that citizens follow a problem-based approach in their support for referendums, in that referendums are considered a suitable solution to address some specific problems in a political system but not all. Survey data from the 2012 European Social Survey (29 countries; N = 37,070) is used to show that citizens' expectations towards and evaluations of representatives relate to support for referendums. In particular, dissatisfaction with the ability of governments to listen to their citizens is associated with higher support for referendums. In contrast, citizens dissatisfied with the government's ability to lead are less supportive of referendums. Furthermore, the relationship between dissatisfaction with governments' ability to listen varies across countries depending on the level of experience with decision making via referendum. In countries where referendums are used more often, the expectation of referendums being able to solve the problem of unresponsive government is weaker. This study offers important insights into the different ways in which preferences and evaluations of representative practices relate to popular support for referendums.

The outcomes of two recent Irish referendums - on marriage equality in 2015 and abortion in 2018 - have placed contemporary Irish voters in sharp contrast with their long-standing conservative Catholic reputation. These referendums also stand out internationally because of an associated deliberative innovation. This paper aims to explain the watershed abortion vote drawing on theories of generational change, issue-voting, cue-taking and deliberative democracy, using data from an exit poll at the 2018 abortion referendum. We show that cleavage and age effects are key to understanding the referendum outcome. These results offer insight into how societal processes such as rapid secularisation, generational replacement and democratic innovations shape politics. Moreover, voters who were aware of the deliberative innovation were more likely to support the liberal referendum option. To increase willingness to deviate from the status quo, engaging citizens actively in the debate is a fruitful approach.

Voters of Populist Parties and Support for Reforms of Representative Democracy in Belgium Recently, studies have burgeoned on the link between populism and demands for democratic reforms. In particular, scholars have been debating the link between populist citizens or voters and support for referendums. In this article, we examine voters of populist parties (Vlaams Belang (VB) and Parti du Travail de Belgique-Partij van de Arbeid (PTB-PVDA)) in Belgium in 2019 and we look at their attitudes towards various types of democratic reforms. We find that voters of populist parties differ from the non-populist electorate in their support for different kinds of reforms of representative democracy. Voters of VB and PTB-PVDA have in common stronger demands for limiting politicians’ prerogatives, for introducing binding referendums and for participatory budgeting. While Vlaams Belang voters are not significantly different from the non-populist electorate on advisory referendums, citizens’ forums or technocratic reform, PVDA-PTB voters seem more enthusiastic.

Concerns are raised repeatedly about the uncivil and simplistic way in which politicians often express their ideas. This political communication style runs counter to deliberative democratic virtues such as respectful interactions and well-justified arguments. Its use is therefore problematic from a normative point of view, yet there are indications that it is an effective communication style to persuade citizens. Two survey experiments - text and audio - were developed to investigate the effects of uncivil communication and simplistic argumentation on political trust and on persuasive power in political election debates. The results show that 1) uncivil communication lowers political trust and is slightly less convincing than civil communication, 2) simplistic argumentation, i.e. political arguments presented in ill- or non-justified ways, does not affect political trust and is not more persuasive than well-justified argumentation, and 3) the strongest violation of social norms, i.e. a combined use of uncivil communication and simplistic argumentation, decreases both trust in the political candidate and persuasive power. Interestingly, politically cynical citizens and citizens who do not value inclusionary debates react differently to uncivil communication and simplistic argumentation: their level of trust does not decline and they are persuaded slightly more by simplistic arguments expressed in uncivil ways.