This article contributes to the debate on the influence of organizational settings on scientists’ media contact. Drawing on a quantitative survey of researchers ( n = 942) from 265 German universities, the results indicate that a large proportion of scientists from all disciplines participate regularly in the dissemination of research findings. The authors provide evidence that scientists’ media efforts are influenced by how they adopt their university’s desire to be visible in the media, as well as by the university’s PR activities. The increased orientation toward news media is discussed in the light of the new governance of science within Europe.

Leading academic institutions, governments, and funders of research across the world have spent the last few decades fretting publicly about the need for scientists and research organisations to engage more widely with the public and be open about their research. While a global literature asserts that public communication has changed from a virtue to a duty for scientists in many countries and disciplines, our knowledge about what research institutions are doing and what factors drive their 'going public' is very limited. Here we present the first cross-national study of N = 2,030 research institutes within universities and large scientific organisations in Brazil, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. We find that institutes embrace communication with non-peers and do so through a variety of public events and traditional news media-less so through new media channels-and we find variation across countries and sciences, yet these are less evident than we expected. Country and disciplinary cultures contribute to the level of this communication, as do the resources that institutes make available for the effort; institutes with professionalised staff show higher activity online. Future research should examine whether a real change in the organisational culture is happening or whether this activity and resource allocation is merely a means to increase institutional visibility.

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The study of subjective democratic legitimacy from a citizens’ perspective has become an important strand of research in political science. Echoing the well‐known distinction between ‘input‐oriented’ and ‘output‐oriented’ legitimacy, the scientific debate on this topic has coined two opposed views. Some scholars find that citizens have a strong and intrinsic preference for meaningful participation in collective decision making. But others argue, to the contrary, that citizens prefer ‘stealth democracy’ because they care mainly about the substance of decisions, but much less about the procedures leading to them. In this article, citizens’ preferences regarding democratic governance are explored, focusing on their evaluations of a public policy according to criteria related to various legitimacy dimensions, as well as on the (tense) relationship among them. Data from a population‐based conjoint experiment conducted in eight metropolitan areas in France, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom is used. By analysing 5,000 respondents’ preferences for different governance arrangements, which were randomly varied with respect to their input, throughput and output quality as well as their scope of authority, light is shed on the relative importance of different aspects of democratic governance. It is found, first, that output evaluations are the most important driver for citizens’ choice of a governance arrangement; second, consistent positive effects of criteria of input and throughput legitimacy that operate largely independent of output evaluations can be discerned; and third, democratic input, but not democratic throughput, is considered somewhat more important when a governance body holds a high level of formal authority. These findings run counter to a central tenet of the ‘stealth democracy’ argument. While they indeed suggest that political actors and institutions can gain legitimacy primarily through the provision of ‘good output’, citizens’ demand for input and throughput do not seem to be conditioned by the quality of output as advocates of stealth democratic theory suggest. Democratic input and throughput remain important secondary features of democratic governance.

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