Public officials can be reluctant to use citizens’ input in decision‐making, especially when turnout is low and participants are unrepresentative of the wider population. Using Fritz Scharpf's democratic legitimacy approach, the authors conducted a survey‐based vignette experiment to examine how the input legitimacy of participatory processes affects (1) public officials’ willingness to use public participation in administrative decision‐making, (2) their assessment of the quality of the policy decision, and (3) their anticipation of popular support for the policy outcome. The study shows that turnout and participants’ representativeness have a positive and significant effect on public officials’ attitudes toward public participation. Specifically, participants’ representativeness influences public officials’ willingness to use citizens’ inputs more than turnout.

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We empirically study whether citizens´ trust in public administration is influenced by the outcomes delivered by public services or by due process (administrative impartiality or absence of corruption) from a regional perspective. The paper fits a multilevel model on a unique dataset with a total of 129,773 observations nested in 173 European regions, using data from a series of pooled Eurobarometer surveys and from the European Quality of Government Index. We find that both public service outcomes and processes have a significant impact on citizens´ trust in public administration, but that process, and in particular absence of corruption is the strongest institutional determinant.