Does Twitter Increase Perceived Police Legitimacy?

Social media use has become increasingly popular among police forces. The literature suggests that social media use can increase perceived police legitimacy by enabling transparency and participation. Employing data from a large and representative survey of Dutch citizens (N = 4,492), this article tests whether and how social media use affects perceived legitimacy for a major social media platform, Twitter. A negligible number of citizens engage online with the police, and thus the findings reveal no positive relationship between participation and perceived legitimacy. The article shows that by enhancing transparency, Twitter does increase perceived police legitimacy, albeit to a limited extent. Subsequent analysis of the mechanism shows both an affective and a cognitive path from social media use to legitimacy. Overall, the findings suggest that establishing a direct channel with citizens and using it to communicate successes does help the police strengthen their legitimacy, but only slightly and for a small group of interested citizens.     

Managing for Legitimacy: Agency Governance in Its “Deep” Constitutional Context

Recent literature on bureaucratic structure has gone further than studying discretions given to bureaucrats in policy making, and much attention is now paid to understanding how bureaucratic agencies are managed. This article proposes that the way in which executive governments manage their agencies varies according to their constitutional setting and that this relationship is driven by considerations of the executive's governing legitimacy. Inspired by Charles Tilly (1984), the authors compare patterns of agency governance in Hong Kong and Ireland, in particular, configurations of assigned decision‐making autonomies and control mechanisms. This comparison shows that in governing their agencies, the elected government of Ireland's parliamentary democracy pays more attention to input (i.e., democratic) legitimacy, while the executive government of Hong Kong's administrative state favors output (i.e., performance) legitimacy. These different forms of autonomy and control mechanism reflect different constitutional models of how political executives acquire and sustain their governing legitimacy.     

Truth, Reconciliation and Settler Denial: Specifying the Canada–South Africa Analogy

Canada??s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is tasked with facing the hundred-year history of Indian Residential Schools. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is frequently invoked in relation to the Canadian TRC, perhaps because this is one of the few TRCs worldwide that Canadians know. Whilst the South African TRC is mainly applauded as an international success, I argue that loose analogizing is often more emotive than concise. Whilst much indeed can be drawn from the South African experience, it is important to specify the Canada?CSouth Africa analogy. In this article, I do so by focussing on the institutional approach to truth and how this relates to issues of settler/White denial. The South African experience teaches that narrow approaches to truth collude with superficial views of reconciliation that deny continuities of violence. Consequently, I argue that Indigenous?Csettler reconciliation requires a broad truth that locates residential schools on a continuum of violence, linking extraordinary abuses with structural injustices and historic colonization with lived relationships.     

Balancing Governance Capacity and Legitimacy: How the Norwegian Government Handled the COVID-19 Crisis as a High Performer

This essay addresses how the Norwegian government has handled the coronavirus pandemic. Compared with many other countries, Norway has performed well in handling the crisis. This must be understood in the context of competent politicians, a high-trust society with a reliable and professional bureaucracy, a strong state, a good economic situation, a big welfare state, and low population density. The Norwegian government managed to control the pandemic rather quickly by adopting a suppression strategy, followed by a control strategy, based on a collaborative and pragmatic decision-making style, successful communication with the public, a lot of resources, and a high level of citizen trust in government. The alleged success of the Norwegian case is about the relationship between crisis management capacity and legitimacy. Crisis management is most successful when it is able to combine democratic legitimacy with government capacity.     

Instituting Peace: Third Party Principles and the Mitchell Effect

Abstract

The notion of legitimacy in international peacebuilding is an assumed one; there is an expectation that the formal, Weberian state institutions advanced therein will automatically be condoned by those in whose name they are delivered. But such bodies have, since at least colonial times, been suspect in many postconflict spaces and have routinely been ignored, resisted and bypassed when their local propriety does not reflect social preferences, and the empirical evidence does not suggest this pattern has stopped. The persistence of this null legitimacy derives from the exclusionary nature of liberal interventionism, which neither seeks local knowledge from which to design institutions nor considers their requirements important in relation to popular legitimacy. This article uses survey data drawn from Southern Sudan to discuss how legitimacy is seen from within and what it might look like.     

The normalizing role of rationalist assumptions in the institutional embedding of neoliberalism

The political economy of Britain over the past three decades provides an interesting example of the consolidation, normalization and institutionalization of a new economic paradigm – neoliberalism. As such, it serves as a potentially instructive focus for debate both about the conditions under which economic paradigms are replaced and consolidated and the evolution of such paradigms through the process of institutionalization. In this paper I suggest that the institutionalization of this new economic paradigm has been associated with the shift from a normative to a normalized and necessitarian neoliberalism. I examine the role played by rationalist assumptions in this extended process of normalization-institutionalization. After presenting a stylized account of the evolution of British neoliberalism, I show how New Labour's monetary policy regime is the heir to the legacy of monetarism and its agenda of labour-market reform is the heir to Thatcherism's supply-side economics. I suggest that the time-inconsistency thesis and the business school globalization thesis have played an equivalent role, for New Labour, to that played for the new right by monetarism and supply-side economics in legitimating neoliberalism. In this way neoliberalism has been normalized. In the final sections of the paper I reflect on the implications of the normalized and necessitarian character of neoliberalism in Britain for its contestability and for democratic economic governance more broadly.     

Social Policy and the Authority of Evidence

The growing call for social policy to be evidence‐based implies that ‘evidence’ possesses an intrinsic authority. Much of the evidence used by governments to formulate or evaluate social policy is signified through statistics and the language of quantification. Evidence presented in this way has the appearance of certainty and a legitimacy that seems beyond challenge. Having an appreciation of the history and sociology of the ‘science of the state’, as statistics was originally defined, helps demystify the authority of social statistics. This enables policy‐makers and program administrators to better discern the policy merit of numerical evidence.     

Transnational Legitimacy in a Globalising World: How the European Union Rescues its States

This article addresses claims regarding the limited legitimacy of international institutions. It argues that the two original appointed supranational institutions of the European Union play a crucial, if systematically underestimated, role not merely in providing legitimacy for the Union itself, but also in shoring up that of its constituent member states. We illustrate that supranationalism enhances national legitimacy in functional, political and administrative terms. It does so by helping member states produce outputs they otherwise could not (particularly by enabling them to deal with transboundary policy problems they would struggle to confront if acting in isolation) and by embedding within national political and administrative systems legally enforceable obligations to respect the interests of actors whose voice is excluded or muffled (de jure or de facto) within purely national political processes. The article contends that the claims to legitimacy made by the EU and its member states are of distinctive character but interdependent and mutually reinforcing.     

Contested Governance: Understanding Justice Interventions in Post-Qadhafi Libya

ABSTRACT

This contribution reflects upon the nexus between transitional justice and peacebuilding through a study of how transitional justice practices in post-Qadhafi Libya interacted with broader efforts to establish governance institutions in the aftermath of Libya’s 2011 armed conflict. It argues that dominant practices of transitional justice, promoted by external actors, prescribed narrow state-centric justice interventions that were ill-suited for a polity in which the state was highly contested. In fact, transitional justice proved divisive in Libya because attempts to project state-centric liberal justice practices were limited by their targeting of weak institutions that lacked local legitimacy and their inability to reconcile alternative normative frameworks that challenge the modern state. In addition, the weakness of Libya’s state institutions allowed thuwwar, or revolutionary armed groups, to dictate an exclusionary form of justice known as political isolation. Drawn from fieldwork conducted in Libya, this contribution provides lessons for both peacebuilding and transitional justice practice that call for a rethinking of teleological notions of transition and greater engagement with notions and concepts that fall outside dominant practices.     

Disrupting the Settler Colonial University: Decolonial Praxis and Place-Based Education in the Okanagan Valley (British Columbia)

This article demonstrates how decolonial Placed-Based Education can disrupt a settler colonial academic status quo. We begin by situating our analysis in the unceded Syilx Territories of the Okanagan Valley (British Columbia, Canada) and proceed by illustrating how both taken-for-granted colonial epistemologies and banal exnominations of white supremacy remain orthodox within mainstream Canadian higher education. We next define “decolonial praxis” by drawing from insights offered by critical feminist, anti-racist, and Indigenous scholars and community organizers before moving into a summary of how we embraced theories and strategies of decolonization coupled with Place-Based Education in an introductory Gender and Women’s Studies course. We conclude with our response to the ongoing exclusions being reproduced by neoliberal universities that result from the primacy they grant to Western knowledges and rationales. The piece reveals how decolonial place-based methods can be leveraged against settler colonial institutions, discourses, and logics to unsettle their claims to legitimacy, land, and authority over learning.     

Does Agency Autonomy Foster Public Participation?

Allocation of public resources is an area in which considerations of both economic efficiency and democratic legitimacy are likely to be present. Public administrators are often blamed for being too devoted to the norms of bureaucratic ethos, such as efficiency, effectiveness, and top‐down control, and less so to the norms of democratic ethos, such as inclusiveness and bottom‐up decision making. This article examines whether managers in agencies with greater budget autonomy are more likely to include the public when allocating resources. Because participation offers an opportunity for agencies to enhance the legitimacy of their decisions, it is expected that the value of citizen input will increase with the degree of agency autonomy. Using data on the practices of citizen participation in budgeting in two state departments—transportation and environment—this study finds that agencies with a higher degree of autonomy tend to be more open to public comment than agencies with more centralized budget processes.     

Local Evaluations of Justice through Truth Telling in Sierra Leone: Postwar Needs and Transitional Justice

This article presents findings from a qualitative case study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in rural Sierra Leone. It adds to the sparse literature directly evaluating local experiences of transitional justice mechanisms. It investigates the conceptual foundations of retributive and restorative approaches to postwar justice, and describes the emerging alternative argument demanding attention be paid to economic, cultural, and social rights in such transitional situations. The article describes how justice is defined in Makeni, a town in Northern Sierra Leone, and shows that the TRC’s restorative approach was unable to generate a sense of postwar justice, and was, to many, experienced as a provocation. The conclusions support an alternative distributive conception of justice and show that local conception of rights, experiences of infringement and needs for redress, demand social, cultural, and economic considerations be taken seriously in transitional justice cases.     

The Big Society: Back to the Future

This article contributes to the steady flow of critiques of the big society idea contained in The Political Quarterly. It focuses chiefly on two sets of parallels. The first is between the big society and the policies pursued by the Thatcher government which, despite their obvious rhetorical differences, contain many striking similarities, including their neoliberal origins, application of the ‘crowding out’ thesis and uncritically idealised notions of community. The second is between the big society and a policy with the same name pursued doggedly by the Chinese Communist Party for nearly 20 years until being abandoned as a failure. Lessons for the Prime Minister's flagship policy are drawn from the Chinese experience. The article concludes with a welcome for the rediscovery of the social by public policy and some suggestions as to how a more participative and democratic state could follow from this breakthrough.     

Legitimacy and Coercion in Peacebuilding: A Balancing Act

ABSTRACT

Despite the tendency of the power literature to analyse legitimacy and coercion in isolation, both theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that coercion and legitimacy are not parallel lines but can interact in different ways, supporting or undermining each other. A methodical exploration of the relationship between legitimacy and coercion is important not only for improving the theoretical literatures on power and legitimacy but also in the light of the increasing interest in the power of legitimacy in statebuilding and peacebuilding. This article first analyses the overall interaction between coercion and legitimacy, and then explores the question that emerges from the interaction analysis; what level of coercion is permitted or required in order for a mission’s local legitimacy to be sustained? Finally, for the practice of peacebuilding, the article shows that an operation needs to understand its initial legitimacy standing with the local population, as this determines how much coercive force it can employ without undermining its overall legitimacy.     

Legitimating beliefs: Sources and indicators

The more a government is effective and fair, the more legitimacy that government is likely to attain, and the more it will possess the potential to elicit compliance without excessive monitoring or punitive action. We explore this proposition using contemporary survey data from sub‐Saharan Africa. In particular, we are interested in the conditions that promote popular legitimating beliefs that provide support for governments that are attempting to serve their entire populations competently and in a manner that is relatively impartial and equitable. This article provides empirical support for a long hypothesized link between the extent of government effectiveness, procedural justice, and citizens' willingness to defer to governmental tax authority. The sample, drawn from a continuum of developing societies in Africa, allows us to analyze the impact of variations in government effectiveness and citizen perceptions of fairness on the sense of obligation to comply with the tax authorities, our indicator for legitimating beliefs.     

The Local Legitimacy of Peacekeepers

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship and policy doctrine alike have identified local legitimacy as an important ‘success factor’ in peacekeeping – but like many such calls for greater attention to local dynamics, it is often unclear what local legitimacy actually means, how to analyse it, what causal processes are at work, and what might obstruct the operationalization of well-intentioned policy recommendations for peacekeepers to seek local legitimacy. This article aims to bring clarity to the complex concept of local legitimacy, including the ways in which insights drawn from legitimacy theory developed in very different social contexts can be adapted to the realities of the conflict societies into which peacekeepers deploy. First, it examines what it means to locate the legitimacy of peace operations at the local level, rather than the international. Second, it clarifies the causal links between peacekeepers’ legitimacy and their effectiveness, reviewing scholarship on local legitimacy and its adaptation of broader legitimacy theory. Third, it identifies three important reasons that locally legitimizing peacekeepers is so difficult in practice, distinguishing between the difficulties derived from the particular features of conflict societies and those derived from the institutional characteristics of peace operations.     

Australia's Children ‘Safe and Well’?1 Collaborating with Purpose Across Commonwealth Family Relationship and State Child Protection Systems

So ubiquitous is reference to collaboration in policy documents that it is in danger of being ignored altogether by service deliverers who are not clear about its rationale, how it is built, or its real value. This is evident in the child and family services context where for example the National Framework for Protecting Australia's Children calls for collaboration and a ‘shared responsibility’ across the state, Commonwealth and the non‐government sectors to keep children safe and well. This article describes a project undertaken to analyse and ultimately increase levels of collaboration between state and Commonwealth government family service providers. The research reinforced an important message that levels of collaboration should align with the vulnerability of children and their families: the greater the level of risks to children, the greater the level of collaboration needed within and between systems to keep children safe.     

Regulating the Internet infrastructure: A comparative appraisal of the legitimacy of ICANN,ITU, and the WSIS

How to generate legitimate forms of governance beyond the nation state is often considered a central question in contemporary world politics. To proceed in theory‐building, scholars need to systematically assign the theory‐driven assumptions on legitimate forms of governance beyond the nation state with the various, already observable, forms of global governance. This article aims to conduct a comparative appraisal of the legitimatory quality of different patterns of governance by applying a framework of indicators for their assessment. The indicators are selected from the scholarly debate within International Relations on the legitimacy of global governance arrangements and structured by a multidimensional concept of legitimacy (input, throughput, and output dimensions). This framework is then applied to international, transnational, and private forms of global governance in the field of Internet regulation in order to show how each of them tries to produce and maintain legitimacy, which strategies it applies, and in how it interacts with its stakeholders.     

Intelligence,Crisis, and Democracy: Institutional Punctuations in Brazil,Colombia, South Africa,and India

This article analyzes why institutional crises are bound to happen and how they impact on national intelligence systems’ development. Punctuated Equilibrium theory is reviewed and employed to explain one institutional crisis in each of Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, and India. In Brazil, the case study is the fall of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN) director in 2008, following the Satiagraha operation conducted by the Federal Police Department (DPF). In Colombia, the 2009 wiretapping scandal known as chuzadas is examined. In South Africa, the investigation in Project Avani (2006–8) is reviewed. Finally, in India the case study is the intelligence crisis following the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008. We found that institutional crises are inevitable because there are tensions between security and democracy, both being co-evolutionary dimensions of successful contemporary state building. However, the impacts of such crises vary across the four cases pending on three variables: (1) degree of functional specialization inside the national intelligence system; (2) degree of external public control over the national intelligence system; (3) whether effectiveness, legitimacy or both were the main drivers of the crisis. Our analysis of the four case studies suggests that the amount of positive institutional change in the aftermath of an intelligence crisis is greater in countries with more functional specialization and stronger external control mechanisms.     

Re-Conceptualizing “Legitimacy” for Studying Electoral Politics in Rural China

This paper critically explores and evaluates the theoretical innovations in the conceptualization of Weber’s theory of legitimacy and its application to the study of Chinese politics. It argues that there is a need for a re-conceptualization of the concept in order to give due recognition to the process of legitimating power based on legal-rational principles in the current context. Thus this paper develops a theoretical framework on legitimacy by relating theory to practice in Chinese electoral participation and the local politics of legitimizing rural authority and improving governance at the grassroots level.