Public trust in citizens’ juries when the people decide on policies: evidence from Switzerland

Facilitative political trust is the reduction in cognitive demand citizens experience when forming their opinions about issues. This type of important for generating legitimate democratic institutions eyes politically uninvolved citizens. The article develops and validates an original direct measure facilitative among voters receiving a voting aid compiled by Swiss municipal-level deliberative minipublic convening twenty ahead federal popular initiative vote on expanding affordable housing policies. Based perceiving randomly selected group as competent aligned with voters’ interests, we find reliable valid latent using confirmatory factor analyses same sample within municipality at two points during campaign, (N = 1159), again around time ballot 472).In subsequent multiple regressions, increases sores are main driver readers’ ratings both aid’s usefulness deciding how to they judge its information peers’ decisions.