Can Online Participation Match In‐Person Democratic Engagement? Evidence From a Cross‐National Experiment
2026-07-15
Democratic innovations increasingly take place online, yet little is known about how online citizen participation affects perceived legitimacy compared to in‐person formats. This study presents findings from a preregistered vignette experiment conducted in Spain and Switzerland. With over 6000 respondents, it compares online participation, offline participation, and no participation across two selection mechanisms, self‐selection and sortition, and examining how effects differ between decision winners and losers. The results show that online citizen participation follows the same general logic as offline participation: both can improve fairness perceptions relative to non‐participatory decision‐making, though offline participation produces somewhat stronger effects. Critically, these benefits are concentrated among decision losers, for whom participation meaningfully improves perceived fairness, while winners' evaluations remain largely unchanged. The selection mechanism proves more consequential than the participatory format: self‐selection consistently improves legitimacy perceptions across both online and offline settings, while sortition reduces both perceived fairness and acceptance likelihood, particularly among decision winners. These findings suggest that the predominant design of existing digital platforms, open and self‐selected, is also the design citizens perceive as most legitimate, though online participation has not yet fully realized the legitimacy‐enhancing potential of in‐person formats.