Abstract Citizens with high populist attitudes are ‘dissatisfied democrats’ because they desire more power to the people. PB apparently addresses this desire, since it takes power away from the elite and gives it back to the people. However, are populist participants indeed more willing to accept the outcome of alternative decision-making procedures when they themselves contributed to it? Taking a mixed-methods approach, combining survey data with interviews with participants to three Dutch PBs, this paper assesses how the populist legitimacy framework works out in practice. The quantitative analysis finds no evidence that populist participants are more (or less) willing to accept the outcome of PB. The interview analysis, however, shows that the underlying mechanisms differ between populist and non-populist participants, indicating a ‘populist experience’. While both populists and non-populists lauded the overall process, populist participants in particular felt heard by their fellow participants and were happy that they got what they wanted and this increased their overall satisfaction. The non-populist participants were more focused on the organisation, and highlighted that the participants were often not entirely representative of the broader population, but they were satisfied with the process, and this trumped the other considerations.
Kindt et al. (Mon,) studied this question.