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Abstract Increased citizen involvement in political decision-making processes is often proposed as a way to increase democratic legitimacy. A diverse set of voices has called for more citizen involvement including seminal democratic theorists, populists and policy-makers across the world. The general assumption is that individuals uniformly value citizen involvement and therefore involvement will increase perceptions of process legitimacy and consent with its outcomes. In this paper, we qualify this assumption. We argue that the extent to which citizen involvement can foster process legitimacy depends on citizens’ values. Involvement can strengthen process legitimacy among people with a low social dominance orientation who value the normative aspects of citizen involvement. Yet people with a strong social dominance orientation appreciate citizen involvement as a strategy to reach more favorable outcomes. If involvement does not lead to favorable outcome, its potential to strengthen process legitimacy is limited for this group of people. The results of a vignette experiment and election surveys confirm that the extent to which outcome favorability shapes people’s perceptions of process legitimacy depends on their social dominance orientation. We urge scholars to take citizens’ values into account when studying the influence of citizen involvement in strengthening democratic legitimacy.