Participatory innovations and maxi-publics: The influence of participation possibilities on perceived legitimacy at the local level in Finland

Participatory innovations (PIs) have been introduced as one possible cure to democratic malaises. Empirical research on these mechanisms for citizen participation has, however, focused on their effects on individuals and policy outcomes, leaving aside their consequences for the wider public. This article fills part of the gap by examining the effect of PIs on perceived legitimacy. The article acknowledges that citizens value not only outcomes but also the inclusiveness of decision-making processes, and defines procedural fairness and outcome satisfaction as the key evaluative criteria behind perceived legitimacy. Both total number and type of PIs are considered as possible factors shaping legitimacy evaluations. By analysing data from 9,022 citizens in 30 Finnish municipalities, the article reveals that introducing PIs is not a simple fix for legitimacy of local governments. The type of participation matters, with discursive participation generating the strongest effects on procedural fairness. However, attention should also be paid to citizens’ awareness of participation possibilities.     

Legitimacy, trust and procedural fairness: Remarks on Marcia Grimes' study

Abstract.  This article is a reply to Marcia Grimes's 2006 contribution to the European Journal of Political Research entitled 'Organizing consent: The role of procedural fairness in political trust and compliance'. The remarks focus on two main points. First, the author discusses the conceptual basis of the study, to argue that trust and legitimacy are quite different concepts that should not be used synonymously. In particular, the author challenges the conceptualization of (subjective) legitimacy in that institutional legitimacy is partly defined as institutional trust. Additionally, the author justifies why (institutional) trust should not be treated as a 'component' of (institutional) legitimacy. Second, the author deals with a methodological problem in Grimes' article. This problem refers to the operationalization of norms of fairness in order to examine the influence of perceived fairness in decision processes on citizens' beliefs of legitimacy. Summing up the author's conceptual and methodological objections, this article offers a somewhat different interpretation of Grimes' main findings.     

Citizen Assessment of Electoral Reforms: Do Evaluations of Fairness Blunt Self-Interest?

A large literature shows that citizens care about the procedural fairness of rules and institutions. This body of work suggests that citizen evaluations of institutional changes should be constrained by fairness considerations, even if they would personally benefit from the reforms. We test this expectation using two panel studies to examine whether citizens become more accepting of proposals rated as unfair (in wave one) after we experimentally manipulate (in wave two) whether the proposals aid their party’s electoral prospects. Using this approach, we are able to establish what citizens see to be fair or unfair separate from their evaluation of a given rule change. We find that supporters of both parties are consistently more favorable toward reforms their fellow partisans and, crucially, they themselves, claim reduce electoral fairness when framed as advancing their partisan interests. The results provide important insights into how citizens evaluate electoral processes, procedural fairness, and, hence, the acceptable limits of institutional change.

     

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.     

Why feed the hand that bites you? Perceptions of procedural fairness and system support in post‐communist democracies

There is widespread agreement that bad governance and corruption represent daunting threats to new democracies and developing countries. Nonetheless, mainstream research on system support and political legitimacy has to a large extent overlooked the crucial importance of public perceptions of procedural fairness for fostering public support and regime legitimacy. Taking its departure in the theory of procedural fairness, this article challenges the conventional wisdom of earlier research by arguing and demonstrating that public perceptions of procedural fairness and impartiality on behalf of the authorities are the most important determinants of system support in the post‐communist European Union Member States. The empirical analysis lends strong support to the fact that perceptions of fairness and the extent of corruption exercise a strong effect on public support for the performance of the political system and approval of regime principles.     

Complementing and correcting representative institutions: When and how to use mini-publics

In democratic theory and practice, it has become a popular view that designed deliberative mini-publics can effectively counteract failures of representative democratic institutions. But when should mini-publics be deployed, and how should they be designed? This article develops a framework for thinking about these questions. It argues that when representative democratic institutions ensure the empowerment of inclusions, enable the formation of collective agendas and wills, and are capable of translating those agendas into binding decisions, mini-publics should be used sparingly and as complementary initiatives; the less representative institutions are able to serve these functions, the more mini-publics should gain independence and standing to correct these problems. The article shows how this can be operationalised in light of two key institutional design issues – coupling and authority – and discusses some empirical examples that foreground the empirical leverage offered by the suggested framework.     

WHAT SHAPES CITIZENS' EVALUATIONS OF THEIR PUBLIC OFFICIALS' ACCOUNTABILITY? EVIDENCE FROM LOCAL ETHIOPIA

In this article, we study which institutional factors shape citizens' views of the local accountability of their public officials. Our departing assumption is that evaluations of local accountability reflect not only citizens' poltical attitudes and beliefs but also whether local institutions contribute to an environment of mutual trust, accountability and ultimately democratic legitimacy. Combining public opinion data from a large‐N citizen survey (N = 10 651) with contextual information for 63 local governments in Ethiopia, we look at access to information, participatory planning and the publicness of basic services as potential predictors of citizens' evaluations of local public officials. Our findings suggest that local context matters. Jurisdictions that provide access to information on political decision making are perceived to have more accountable officials. Moreover, when local governments provide public fora that facilitate citizens' stakes in local planning processes, it positively affects citizens' evaluations of the accountability of their officials. Our study adds to the empirical literatrure by showing that establishing local institutions that can foster citizen–government relations at the local level through inclusive processes is crucial for improving public perceptions of accountability. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What price fairness when security is at stake? Police legitimacy in South Africa

The legitimacy of legal authorities – particularly the police – is central to the state's ability to function in a normatively justifiable and effective manner. Studies, mostly conducted in the US and UK, regularly find that procedural justice is the most important antecedent of police legitimacy, with judgments about other aspects of police behavior – notably, about effectiveness – appearing less relevant. But this idea has received only sporadic testing in less cohesive societies where social order is more tenuous, resources to sustain it scarcer, and the position of the police is less secure. This paper considers whether the link between process fairness and legitimacy holds in the challenging context of present day South Africa. In a high crime and socially divided society, do people still emphasize procedural fairness or are they more interested in instrumental effectiveness? How is the legitimacy of the police influenced by the wider problems faced by the South African state? We find procedural fairness judgments play a key role, but also that South Africans place greater emphasis on police effectiveness (and concerns about crime). Police legitimacy is, furthermore, associated with citizens' judgments about the wider success and trustworthiness of the state.     

Democratic legitimacy in regional economic organizations: the European Union in comparative perspective

Regional organizations have been widely criticized for lacking democratic legitimacy, but these criticisms have been rather ad hoc, concerned with single case studies and reliant on unclear standards or metrics. Are all organizations similarly deficient? And how does the European Union (EU), the target par excellence of the criticisms, fare in comparative perspective? In this paper, we take a first step towards answering these questions by leveraging the rich debate on the EU to identify several institutional dimensions of democratic legitimacy and operationalizing them for comparative analysis. We then investigate the most important regional economic organizations (REOs) in the world. Our findings are three-fold: (i) there is systematic variation across REOs, with a group doing rather well, one mixed, and one poorly; (ii) procedural dimensions fare better than those related to representation or local self-determination; (iii) no organization exhibits or lacks legitimacy in all dimensions. These results qualify the perception that democratic legitimacy deficits are indiscriminately pervasive and indicate that the EU belongs to the most democratically legitimate group.     

The importance of input and output legitimacy in democratic governance: Evidence from a population-based survey experiment in four West European countries

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.     

Mobile Capital, Democratic Institutions, and the Public Economy in Advanced Industrial Societies

This article addresses the following questions. Is international capital mobility systematically related to reductions in the size of the public economy, as globalization theory suggests? Alternatively, do democratic institutions and processes shape the ways in which internationalization affects national policies? Specifically, I argue that the effects of capital mobility on the scope of the public economy should be conditioned by the institutional forms of societal interest representation and the formal organization of decision-making authority within the polity. Utilizing econometric analysis of 1964–1993 data from 16 nations, I find that international capital mobility has few direct effects on the scope of the public economy. However, configurations of democratic institutions fundamentally shape the domestic policy impacts of capital mobility. Where social corporatism and inclusive electoral institutions are strong and where decision-making authority within the polity is concentrated, international capital mobility is either unrelated to the scope of the public economy or positively associated with total public spending, social transfers, and public consumption. In institutional contexts of pluralist interest and exclusive electoral representation, and in polities where decision-making is dispersed, rises in capital mobility are systematically associated with rollbacks of the public sector.     

Globale Besteuerung und Demokratische Legitimität

The democratic state has been offering the conditions for legitimately levying taxes. Tax revenues have been securing the sovereign’s ability to act, policy aims pursued through taxation have been the outcome of a democratic process and the coercion backed institutions levying taxes have enjoyed the status of democratic legitimacy. But a twofold dynamic challenges this status quo. States are under pressure to address problems to which global taxation offers the most promising response. And phenomena like capital mobility impose constraints on the state’s ability to effectively use the policy instrument of taxation. Under what institutional arrangements could taxation be maintained as a justifiable instrument? And what should future institutional arrangements of public finance look like?     

Confidence in Institutions in Post-Communist Societies: The Case of the Baltic States

The transition from totalitarian to democratic rule in the Baltic states raises the question of conditions for regime legitimacy and stability. The article focuses on the level of confidence people have in institutions after change of regime. The confidence in political and social institutions is at a surprisingly low level. The data suggest that people have more confidence in institutions producing symbols than they have in policy-making and implementing institutions. There is also evidence to show that leaders are more trusted than institutions as such. A survey of the potential background variables shows that people with higher education have lower confidence in institutions than the less well educated. But low confidence in institutions does not necessarily spell gloomy prospects for procedural democratic development, as long as the elites do have some popular support and the capacity for consensual integration.     

Democratic legitimacy and direct elections to the European parliament

The theme of ‘democratic legitimacy’ and the way it affects the institutions and development of the European Community is a recurrent one both in the literature on Western European integration and especially in debates amongst European politicians and parliamentarians. This article examines the theme within the context of the direct elections to be held to the European Parliament in 1979. It is argued that the European Parliament has certain legitimacy problems which stem from the nature of its authority, intelligibility, visibility, and the way in which it acts as the European Community's ‘grand forum’. The holding of European elections will not in themselves overcome these problems, and a number of suggestions are offered as to how the European Parliament and the European Community can achieve democratic legitimacy.¹     

How Authoritarianism Intensifies Punctuated Equilibrium: The Dynamics of Policy Attention in Hong Kong

The punctuated equilibrium theory contends that government attention allocation is universally leptokurtic in that long periods of stability are punctuated by bursts of rapid and radical change; the empirical evidence in support of this claim is however exclusively drawn from democratic systems. The absence of electoral politics and institutional decentralization in authoritarian regimes could presumably affect institutional friction; whether and how this might pose as a qualification to the thesis is of major interest. By analyzing four streams of government actions in Hong Kong from 1946 to 2007 straddling the colonial and postcolonial regimes, we have found that government processes are generally leptokurtic even under authoritarian regime institutions, with the degree of the dispersion of decision‐making power across the streams of actions affecting the magnitude of punctuation. We have also found that punctuation was greater when the political system was more centralized but declined as the political system democratized.     

Democratic Performance of Parties and Legitimacy in Europe

This article analyses the development of legitimacy across 20 European democracies (1990–2010). The claim is that the democratic performance of parties affects levels of legitimacy. A conceptual and empirical discussion is presented to establish this relationship. Democratic performance is characterised by trusting parties to be responsive to the electorate and responsible in government. Legitimacy is defined as a composite measure representing satisfaction with parties, compliance with the rule of law as well as voter turnout and willingness to protest. The responsiveness of parties appears less representative on public concerns and governmental responsibility appears closer to party interests than to the general interest. Hence, a ‘democratic deficit’ seems to have emerged across Europe, manifested by more electoral volatility, new parties and alternation in government and lower survival rates of governments. This negatively affects trust in parties, parliament and government efficacy. Hence, party behaviour has not strongly contributed to political legitimacy since the 1990s.     

Consultants, depoliticization and arena-shifting in the policy process: privatizing water in Berlin

This paper examines the effects of the growing presence of management consultants in policy processes. In particular, it addresses the key concern that consultants employed by governments often operate in new institutional arrangements not subject to the formal rules of political systems. Their activities, often secretive, are seen to undermine the democratic legitimacy of political decision-making. Despite the significance of these concerns there is still a lack of conceptual and empirical research on these topics. Addressing this gap, the paper first seeks to begin a more conceptual discussion about the role of consultants and “governance”. Turning to the literature on depoliticization in public policy, and following Flinders and Buller (Br Polit 1(3):293–318, 2006), it is argued that the hiring of consultants should be seen not as a move from political to apparently neutral, expert forms of policy-making, but as a shift in the arena of political decision-making. Such shifts can contribute to the emergence of what Hajer (Policy Sci 36(2):175–195, 2003a) calls the “institutional voids” of governance: the emergence of ad hoc political spaces in which the rules and outcomes of policy-making are unclear. It is argued that these ad hoc spaces may work to undermine the traditional institutions of political systems without providing an alternative form of democratic legitimacy. The paper examines these issues with reference to a case study of consultants working for the Berlin government on the privatization of the Berlin Water Company in 1999. It concludes by reflecting on the usefulness of the arena-shifting notion and outlining areas for future research.     

What motivates adherence to medical recommendations? The procedural justice approach to gaining deference in the medical arena

Although it is within their long‐term interest, patients often fail to follow health care recommendations made by medical experts. This failure results in the widespread occurrence of preventable health problems and a significant increase in health care costs. Taking a new approach to confronting this issue, this paper examines whether the procedural justice model, which has been useful in explaining cooperation with legal and managerial authorities, can provide a basis for increasing patients' willingness to voluntarily adhere to health care recommendations. Three studies tested and supported this proposition. Study 1 experimentally manipulated physicians' procedural fairness or unfairness to explore its influence on patients' acceptance of doctors' recommendations. Study 2 used patients' reports about the fairness of their personal physicians and linked those evaluations to their willingness to follow their doctor's recommendations. Finally, study 3 explored the role of general procedural justice judgments in promoting willingness to accept health policies when they are advocated by private doctors and government health care authorities. The results of all three studies support the argument that when health care authorities use fair procedures, patients are more likely to accept their recommendations. Importantly, this procedural justice effect is distinct from, and in some cases stronger than, the influence of competence.     

Supply and Support for Grassroots Political Reform in Rural China

Evidence suggests that the quality of grassroots political reform varies throughout rural China from fair elections to electoral manipulation. This reflects an uneven supply of reforms. However, top-down implementation is not a complete measure of success when it comes to the introduction of grassroots reform. Rural folks are good judges of institutional qualities, such as procedural fairness. It is their attitudes that are associated with the support for democracy. This is called the supply and support model. I modify and apply this model to rural China, and show that support for democratic institutions and ideals can develop within an authoritarian regime such as the People’s Republic of China.     

When Do the Ends Justify the Means? Evaluating Procedural Fairness

How do people decide whether a political process is fair or unfair? Concerned about principles of justice, people might carefully evaluate procedural fairness based on the facts of the case. Alternately, people could be guided by their prior preferences, endorsing the procedures that produce favored policy outcomes as fair and rating those that generate disliked outcomes as unfair. Using an experimental design, we consider the conditions under which people use accuracy goals versus directional goals in evaluating political processes. We find that when procedures are clearly fair or unfair, people make unbiased assessments of procedural justice. When the fairness of a process is ambiguous, people are more likely to use their prior attitudes as a guide.