Improving Policy Legitimacy through Crowdsourcing Legislation

Crowdsourcing initiatives have been created in the past years with the specific objectiveof providing citizens with a platform to participate in policy and in lawmaking processes.It has been assumed that the incorporation of citizens in these processes should have asan outcome more legitimate policies. Nevertheless the connection between legitimatepolicies and crowdsourcing legislation has been the object of little research. Throughthree case studies of crowdsourcing legislation, research on the literature relevant to thisemerging field, and an analysis of the three CrowdLaw conferences held at the GovLab,this thesis explains why the relation between crowdsourcing legislation and improvementof legitimacy attitudes needs to be considered from a normative and an empiricalapproach. From a normative approach crowdsourcing legislation improves the throughputlegitimacy of policies. From an empirical approach, to test a change of political attitudesin participants of crowdlaw, surveys should be applied to participants during and after thecrowdlaw projects take place. By analyzing previous crowdsourcing legislation projects aseries of benefits, challenges and recommendations were identified.