Democratic Innovations: Reinforcing or Changing Perceptions of Trust?

ABSTRACT

Declining trust in representative institutions is considered one of the most significant political problems of our time. It is often suggested that democratic innovations—or mechanisms which aim to increase and deepen citizen participation in the political decision-making process—can help reverse this trend. However, empirical research about actual effects of participation on trust is scarce, and weakened by causality problems. With survey data representing 1,470 participants in a landmark Swedish e-petition system, the article shows that both generalized attitudes and process evaluations matter in how trust is affected by democratic innovations.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizen participation
• democratic innovations
• e-petitions
• public trust

Notes

^1. The three models were designed to predict the odds for holding the specified trust perception (decreased trust, stable trust, or increased trust), given the participants’ characteristics on the independent variables and control variables. The dependent variables were coded as follows: participants with the specified trust perception were coded as 1; while all other participants were coded as 0.