Who speaks out when politicians tune in ? Interpersonal trust and participation in public consultations

Public consultations, especially online, are more and more commonplace in contemporary democracies. This work aims to study how interpersonal trust determines participation in public consultations, and the forms there of. I use the Grand Débat National, that occurred in France in 2019, as a natural experiment to study the geographic cross sectional relation ship between a novel synthetic measure of local interpersonal trust and various aspects of participation in this public consultation. Then I study evidence from a small-scale experiment on interpersonal trust and participation in an online public consultation. I conclude that high-trust individuals participate more to public consultations compared to low-trust individuals, both at the extensive and intensive margins, and that there exists a discrepancy in their forms of participation, in terms of content, but also when it comes to textual or lexical aspects of participation. This result calls for questioning the common presumption that public consultations will give a better representation to and help design be.er policies for everyone, particularly low-trust individuals. In fact, it appears that public consultations can be instead captured by the demands of high-trust individuals.