Private citizens, stakeholder groups, or governments? Perceived legitimacy and participation in water collaborative governance

Abstract Collaborative governance (CG), involving partnership between governmental and non‐governmental actors, has emerged as an alternative to traditional government (TG). While CG may be seen as a strategy for increasing legitimacy, we know little about how the public evaluates inclusion of private citizens and stakeholder groups in decision‐making processes. Following the methodology of Cain et al. in their 2020 study of transportation and drawing on legitimacy theory, we develop a series of “components” of legitimacy. We then use these to test how respondents perceive the legitimacy of different institutional arrangements through a survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. Our results reveal that regardless of board function, respondents perceived CG as more legitimate than TG. Among different types of CG, they prefer the inclusion of private citizens over stakeholder groups, adding empirical data to theoretical debate over how and under what conditions CG may increase the legitimacy of public governance.