The Role of Consensus in Legitimation through Deliberation: An Experimental Approach

Previous research has advanced scholarly understandings of legitimacy formation at the individual level, yet has not taken into account that individuals develop their legitimacy beliefs in communication activities with others. Our study seeks to address this shortcoming by advancing a dialogical approach which construes legitimacy formation as an outcome of social interaction. We study the legitimacy formation process in the context of a deliberation experiment where we asked participants to discuss in small groups a controversial topic (i.e., the Swiss Responsible Business Initiative). Before and after the deliberation we measured participants’ legitimacy beliefs, as well as their behavioral intentions to assess the degree to which these variables changed during the deliberation. Additionally, we manipulated the level of agreement within the deliberation groups to understand how group consensus affects the impact of deliberation on legitimacy formation. Overall, we find that deliberation results in a stronger change of legitimacy beliefs and behavioral intentions if participants deliberate in a low compared to a high consensus group. Our study contributes to legitimacy theory by conceptualizing and empirically testing legitimacy formation as a dialogical process. Moreover, we present and apply the deliberation experiment as a promising novel method for testing cause-and-effect relationships in the process of legitimacy formation.