Democracy's Deep Roots: Why the Nation State Remains Legitimate (Transformations of the State)

Transformations of the State Series Editors: Achim Hurrelmann, Carleton University, Canada; Stephan Leibfried, Universi...

Author: Steffen Schneider | Achim Hurrelmann | Frank Nullmeier | Achim Wiesner | Zuzana Krell-Laluhov

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Transformations of the State Series Editors: Achim Hurrelmann, Carleton University, Canada; Stephan Leibfried, University of Bremen, Germany; Kerstin Martens, University of Bremen, Germany; Peter Mayer, University of Bremen, Germany.

Joan DeBardeleben and Achim Hurrelmann (editors) DEMOCRATIC DILEMMAS OF MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE Legitimacy, Representation and Accountability in the European Union Klaus Dingwerth THE NEW TRANSNATIONALISM Transnational Governance and Democratic Legitimacy Achim Hurrelmann, Steffen Schneider and Jens Steffek (editors) LEGITIMACY IN AN AGE OF GLOBAL POLITICS Achim Hurrelmann, Stephan Leibfried, Kerstin Martens and Peter Mayer (editors) TRANSFORMING THE GOLDEN-AGE NATION STATE Anja P. Jakobi INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AND LIFELONG LEARNING From Global Agendas to Policy Diffusion Kerstin Martens, Alessandra Rusconi and Kathrin Leuze (editors) NEW ARENAS OF EDUCATION GOVERNANCE The Impact of International Organizations and Markets on Educational Policy Making Kerstin Martens, Alexander-Kenneth Nagel, Michael Windzio and Ansgar Weymann (editors) TRANSFORMATION OF EDUCATION POLICY Thomas Rixen THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF INTERNATIONAL TAX GOVERNANCE Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner DEMOCRACY’S DEEP ROOTS Why the Nation State Remains Legitimate Peter Starke RADICAL WELFARE STATE RETRENCHMENT A Comparative Analysis Jens Steffek, Claudia Kissling and Patrizia Nanz (editors) CIVIL SOCIETY PARTICIPATION IN EUROPEAN AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE A Cure for the Democratic Deficit? Michael J. Warning TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC GOVERNANCE Networks, Law and Legitimacy Hartmut Wessler, Bernhard Peters, Michael Brűggemann, Katharina Kleinen-von Kőnigslőw and Stefanie Sifft TRANSNATIONALIZATION OF PUBLIC SPHERES

10.1057/9780230275331 - Democracy's Deep Roots, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-03

Titles include:

Hartmut Wessler (editor) PUBLIC DELIBERATION AND PUBLIC CULTURE The Writings of Bernhard Peters, 1993–2005

Transformations of the State Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–4039–8544–6 (hardback) 978–1–4039–8545–3 (paperback) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England



Jochen Zimmerman, Jörg R. Werner and Philipp B. Volmer GLOBAL GOVERNANCE IN ACCOUNTING Public Power and Private Commitment

Democracy’s Deep Roots

Steffen Schneider Research Associate, TranState Research Centre, University of Bremen, Germany

Achim Hurrelmann Assistant Professor of Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Zuzana Krell-Laluhová European Commission, Brussels, Belgium

Frank Nullmeier Professor of Political Science, Centre for Social Policy Research, University of Bremen, Germany

Achim Wiesner University of Bremen, Germany



Why the Nation State Remains Legitimate

© Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier, Achim Wiesner 2010

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–24762–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

List of Figures

vi

List of Tables

vii

Series Editors’ Preface

ix

Preface and Acknowledgements

xi

List of Authors

xii

1 Introduction: A Legitimacy Crisis of the Democratic Nation State?

1

2 The Communicative Dimension of Legitimacy: A Text Analytical Perspective

15

3 How Stable is the Legitimacy of the Democratic Nation State?

58

4 How Democratic is the Legitimacy of the Nation State?

100

5 Relegitimation Strategies: Countering Threats to the Legitimacy of Political Systems

155

6 Conclusion: Broadening the Agenda of Legitimacy Research

183

7 Methodological Appendix

203

Notes

219

References

229

Index

245

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Contents

2.1 Dimensions of and participants in legitimation processes 35 3.1 Legitimacy attention cycles by country and issue area (2004) 61 3.2 Legitimating or delegitimating tendency of issue debates by country (2004) 71 3.3 Case studies: Shifts in intensity and legitimacy levels (1990–2004) 75 3.4 Legitimacy attention cycles by country and object (2004) 87 3.5 Legitimating or delegitimating tendency by object category (2004) 88 3.6 Concentration and dispersal of legitimation discourses (‘effective number’ of legitimation objects, 2004) 94 4.1 Concentration and dispersal of legitimation discourses (‘effective number’ of legitimation patterns, 2004) 114 4.2 Legitimating or delegitimating tendency by pattern category (2004) 118 4.3 Case studies: Shifts in the use of democratic patterns and legitimacy levels (1990–2004) 119

vi 10.1057/9780230275331 - Democracy's Deep Roots, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner


Figures

1.1 Types of legitimacy crisis 2.1 Dimensions of and approaches to empirical legitimacy 2.2 The grammar of legitimation 2.3 Political internationalization, media systems, and legitimation discourses 2.4 Overview, institutional arrangements 2.5 Overview, monitoring and case study corpora 3.1 Legitimation statements by country and issue area (2004, %) 3.2 Case studies: Intensity and legitimacy levels 3.3 Objects of legitimation: Aggregate and individual categories 3.4 Objects of legitimation: Concentration and dispersal 3.5 Legitimation statements by country and object category (2004, %) 3.6 Objects of legitimation evaluated in at least five per cent of statements by country (2004) 3.7 Legitimation styles: Concentration on objects of legitimation (2004) 4.1 Patterns of legitimation: Aggregate and individual categories 4.2 Legitimacy crises and legitimation risks 4.3 Patterns of legitimation evaluated in at least five per cent of statements by country (2004) 4.4 Legitimation statements by country and pattern category (2004, %) 4.5 Aggregate patterns of legitimation by regime level, for delegitimating statements (2004, %) 5.1 Modes of relegitimation 5.2 Types of relegitimation strategies 6.1 Types of relational legitimation statements (multilevel legitimation) 7.1 Accuracy of automated search routines (‘false negatives’)

11 18 43 47 48 52 60 74 81 85 88 89 94 112 113 116 117 130 159 174 194 210

vii 10.1057/9780230275331 - Democracy's Deep Roots, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner


Tables

Tables

7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8

Reliability test, text selection – sample Reliability test, text selection – findings Case studies, number of statements, and raw values Reliability test, object variable – findings Reliability test, (de)legitimation variable – findings Reliability test, pattern variable – findings Reliability test, issue variable – findings

211 211 213 215 216 217 217



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When we think about the future of the modern state, we encounter a puzzling variety of scholarly diagnoses and prophecies. Some authors predict nothing less than the total demise of the state as a useful model for organizing society – its powers eroded by a dynamic global economy and by an increasing transference of political decision-making powers to supranational bodies. Others disagree profoundly. They point to the remarkable resilience of the state and its core institutions. For them, even in the age of global markets and politics, the state remains the ultimate guarantor of security, democracy, welfare and the rule of law. These debates raise complex questions for the social sciences: what is happening to the modern liberal nation-state of the OECD bloc? Is it an outdated model? Is it still useful? Is it in need of modest reform or far-reaching changes? The state is a complex entity, providing many different services and regulating many areas of everyday life. There can be no simple answer to these questions. The Transformations of the State series will try to disaggregate the tasks and functions of the state into four key, but manageable dimensions: ● ● ● ●

the monopolization of the means of force; the rule of law as prescribed and safeguarded by the constitution; the guarantee of democratic self-governance; the provision of welfare and the assurance of social cohesion.

In the OECD world of the 1960s and 1970s these four institutional aspects merged as the central characteristics of the modern state, forming a synergetic whole. This series is devoted to empirical and theoretical studies exploring the transformations of this historical model and the promise it still holds today and for the future. Books in the series address research on one or several of these dimensions, in all of which crucial change is taking place. Although political science is the main disciplinary approach, many books will be interdisciplinary in nature and may also draw upon law, economics, history and sociology. We hope that taken together these volumes will provide its readers with the ‘state of the art’ on the ‘state of the state’.

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Series Editors’ Preface

Series Editor’s Preface

This book contributes to the work of the Collaborative Research Centre Transformations of the State at the University of Bremen (Germany), and is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The state analyses pursued by the Centre are readily accessible through two overview volumes: Stephan Leibfried and Michael Zürn, (eds), Transformations of the State? (2005); and Achim Hurrelmann, Stephan Leibfried, Kerstin Martens and Peter Mayer, (eds), Transforming the Golden-Age Nation State (2007), published in the Transformations of the State series. Further information on the Centre can be found at www.state.uni-bremen.de. ACHIM HURRELMANN, STEPHAN LEIBFRIED, K ERSTIN M ARTENS A ND PETER MAYER Series Editors



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This book documents the first phase (2003–6) of a research project carried out at the TranState (‘Transformations of the State’) Research Centre of the University of Bremen. One of the key assumptions of the Research Centre is that the democratic nation state of the postwar decades was a legitimate regime form, and that this legitimacy was grounded in its democratic quality. Against this backdrop, the present volume examines whether the political developments and challenges of the ‘post-national constellation’ have ushered in a legitimacy crisis of the democratic nation state. However, on the basis of a novel, text analytical approach to empirical legitimacy research, we propose a rather sanguine assessment of public support for Western democracies in the age of globalization (see also Hurrelmann et al. 2005, 2009; Schneider 2008). The research team behind this book – Frank Nullmeier with Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Steffen Schneider and Achim Wiesner – are indebted to a number of institutions and individuals. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has funded our research since 2003, and continues to do so, in the context of the TranState Research Centre. The research project itself was developed and initiated by Frank Nullmeier together with Roland Lhotta, who left the University of Bremen in 2004 to become professor at Helmut Schmidt University (the University of the German Armed Forces) in Hamburg. We would also like to thank our colleagues at the Research Centre, the new members of our team – Dominika Biegoń, Jennifer Gronau, Martin Nonhoff, and Henning Schmidtke – and several cohorts of student research assistants for many fruitful discussions and their support. Sebastian Haunss, Tanja Klenk, and Tanja Pritzlaff provided us with major inputs in the early phase of the project. Vicki May has done an outstanding job in reviewing and improving the English-language manuscript. Last but not least, we thank the Research Centre’s director, Stephan Leibfried, as well as Alexandra Webster and her collaborators at Palgrave Macmillan for ensuring the swift publication of this book once we as authors ‘had our act together’. Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier, and Achim Wiesner xi 10.1057/9780230275331 - Democracy's Deep Roots, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner


Preface and Acknowledgements

Achim Hurrelmann is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. His research focuses on democracy and legitimacy in the European Union, multilevel governance, and European integration theory. His books include Democratic Dilemmas of Multilevel Governance (ed. with Joan DeBardeleben, 2007); Transforming the GoldenAge Nation State (ed. with Stephan Leibfried, Kerstin Martens and Peter Mayer, 2007); and Verfassung und Integration in Europe (2005). His articles have appeared in journals such as European Journal of Political Research, European Political Science Review, Comparative European Politics, European Law Journal, Politische Vierteljahresschrift, and Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft. Zuzana Krell Laluhová was a Research Associate at the TranState Research Centre, University of Bremen, and now works for the European Commission. In her academic research, she focuses on the legitimation of the nation state, with a special emphasis on the new EU member states. Her publications include ‘Slowakische Republik, Tschechische Republik’, in M. Neu et al. (eds), Handbuch der Außenwirtschaftspolitiken: Staaten und Organisationen, vol. 2 (2004) and ‘Why the Democratic Nation-State is Still Legitimate: A Study of Media Discourses’, European Journal of Political Research 48 (with Achim Hurrelmann, Frank Nullmeier, Steffen Schneider and Achim Wiesner, 2009). Frank Nullmeier is Professor of Political Science at the Centre for Social Policy Research, University of Bremen, Germany. His areas of research include social policy analysis in a sociology-of-knowledge perspective and the micro-analysis of decision-making processes. Recent publications include ‘Knowledge and Decision-Making’, in S. Maasen and P. Weingart (eds), Democratization of Expertise? Exploring Novel Forms of Scientific Advice in Political Decision-Making (2005); ‘Legitimationen der Sozialpolitik’, in Herbert Obinger and Elmar Rieger (eds), Wohlfahrtsstaatlichkeit in entwickelten Demokratien (2009); Entscheiden in Gremien: Von der Video-Aufzeichnung zur Prozessanalyse (with Tanja Pritzlaff, Anne C. Weihe and Britta Baumgarten, 2008); and Politische Theorie des Sozialstaates (2000). Steffen Schneider is a Research Associate at the TranState Research Centre, University of Bremen. His research focuses on the legitimacy xii 10.1057/9780230275331 - Democracy's Deep Roots, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner


Authors

of national and international political orders, on single-party dominance in Western democracies, and on labour market policy-making in advanced industrial economies. His books and journal articles include Legitimacy in an Age of Global Politics (ed. with Achim Hurrelmann and Jens Steffek, 2007) and ‘La légitimité des systèmes politiques, l’espace public et les médias’, Politique et Sociétés 27 (2008); other articles have appeared in European Journal of Political Research, Canadian Public Policy, Leviathan, Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, and Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen. Achim Wiesner was a Research Associate at the Centre for Social Policy Research and currently holds an administrative position at the University of Bremen. His research interests are in the areas of political ethnography, post-secondary education policy, and federalism. His publications include Politik unter Einigungszwang: Eine Analyse föderaler Verhandlungsprozesse (2006); Mikro-Policy-Analyse: Ethnographische Politikforschung am Beispiel Hochschulpolitik (with Frank Nullmeier and Tanja Pritzlaff, 2003); and ‘Legalität und Legitimität – erneut betrachtet’, in Michael Becker and Ruth Zimmerling (eds), Politik und Recht (with Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Steffen Schneider, 2006).



Authors xiii


This illustration is taken from the original etching in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan of 1651. Palgrave Macmillan and the editors are grateful to Lucila Muñoz-Sanchez and Monika Sniegs for their help in redesigning the original to illustrate what “transformations of the state” might mean. The inscription at the top of the original frontispiece reads “non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei” ( Job 41.33): “there is no power on earth which can be compared to him”. In the Bible, this refers to the seamonster, Leviathan. (Original Leviathan image reprinted courtesy of the British Library.)


Introduction: A Legitimacy Crisis of the Democratic Nation State?

According to one of the more recent Eurobarometer public opinion surveys, 40 per cent of Germans and 30 per cent of the British trusted – while 54 and 64 per cent, respectively, distrusted – their national government in the autumn of 2007. In the same year, a mere 48.3 per cent of the population participated in the national elections of Switzerland while 61.7 per cent of the ‘voting-eligible’ population turned out in the United States presidential and congressional elections a year later.1 And, while observers such as the political scientist Marc J. Hetherington (2004: 26) or the Washington Post journalist E. J. Dionne (1991) bluntly claim that Americans ‘hate’ the government and politics of their nation, the 14 March 2004 issue of the Post draws on the traditional imagery of the United States as a ‘city on a hill’ to suggest that the country is ‘a beacon of morality and justice, and a fit model for other nations ...’. We posit that these and similar pieces of evidence reveal something about the legitimacy of political systems such as Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the United States. But what exactly do they reveal – and what do we mean by the term ‘legitimacy’ to begin with? The question seems urgent. After all, if a substantial body of political science literature and equally concerned media reports are to be trusted, the democratic nation state and its core representative institutions – parliaments – are affected by a serious performance and legitimacy crisis today (Held 1995; Abromeit 2002; Sassen 2002; Albrow 2003; Zürn 2005; Hurrelmann and Leibfried et al. 2007b; Weinert 2007). We are thus faced with a somewhat paradoxical situation: despite the conspicuous lack of normatively plausible alternatives to the models of liberal constitutionalism and representative democracy, and despite their presumptive global triumph in the 1980s and 1990s (Huntington 1991; Fukuyama 1992), scepticism has prevailed in recent assessments of the 1 10.1057/9780230275331 - Democracy's Deep Roots, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner


1


legitimacy and democratic quality of political systems in the Western world itself (Pharr and Putnam 2000; Dalton 2004; Torcal and Montero 2006). Notwithstanding the dominance of such pessimistic accounts, however, more sanguine positions may also be found in the literature. According to these, established democracies are faced not so much with an erosion of legitimacy as with the transformation of its foundations (Zürn 1998; Scharpf 1999, 2000; Beck 2005). The present book engages with this important yet largely unresolved debate on the legitimacy of democratic nation states in the age of globalization (for an overview, see Hurrelmann and Schneider et al. 2007b, 2007c). Is the legitimacy of Western democracies truly waning, or is it being reinvented? What does it mean for democratic nation states if the extent or foundations of their legitimacy are indeed changing, and which dynamics or mechanisms underpin their (de)legitimation? Such questions will be tackled on the basis of an empirical study probing the legitimation of four OECD democracies – Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the United States – during the 1990s and early 2000s. Based on an original set of textual data, the study examines the nature and development of national legitimation discourses – that is, legitimacyrelated communication – in the opinion-leading press of these four countries. However, given that extant work in the field has so far paid no more than scant attention to the communicative dimension of legitimation, the book aims not least at making a conceptual and methodological contribution to legitimacy research. This introduction – in which we outline our own understanding of the term legitimacy and give a cursory review of crisis diagnoses offered in the extant literature on Western democracies – sets the stage for the remainder of the book.

Legitimacy as an empirical concept The term ‘legitimacy’ undoubtedly denotes a key issue (Easton 1975: 451) – and perhaps even the ‘master question’ (Crick 1959: 150) – of political thought, namely, the justification of political authority. At the same time, there is no denying the ‘essentially contested’ nature of concepts such as democracy and legitimacy (Gallie 1956: 183–7; Collier et al. 2006; Hurrelmann and Schneider et al. 2007a: 229–37). The discipline’s preoccupation with legitimacy has, however, followed a decidedly cyclical trajectory (Abromeit and Stoiber 2007: 35). The issue of legitimacy and related crisis diagnoses tend to crop up in phases of intense political conflict or massive change (Beetham 1991: 3), and each cyclical peak brings the contested nature of legitimacy to the fore.



2

Small wonder, then, that globalization has triggered the latest major wave of contributions to this literature (Gilley 2006b: 499), and that the current debate on the alleged legitimacy crisis of the democratic nation state once again highlights substantial disagreement on the meaning and implications of legitimacy: to what exactly do we refer when we use this elusive and ambiguous term? What are its normative or empirical foundations? Which conditions have to be fulfilled for political systems to be legitimate, and what are the consequences of shifts in the extent or foundations of their legitimacy? How do we recognize a legitimacy crisis when we see it? Our own understanding of legitimacy is grounded in two fundamental distinctions: first, between normative and empirical uses of the term; second, between legitimacy and support defined more broadly, as any kind of ‘attitude by which a person orients himself to an object either favorably or unfavorably, positively or negatively’ (Easton 1975: 436). The crucial distinction between normative and empirical uses of the term legitimacy – or between an actor’s and an observer’s perspective on the phenomenon – appears straightforward enough but is nevertheless ignored surprisingly often (Beetham 1991: chapter 1; Barker 2001: 7–12; Peters 2005: 97–8). The formulation and justification of procedural or substantive criteria for the acceptability of political orders – that is, for the conditions under which they are worthy of compliance – is at the centre of normative work in the field. But the democracy measurement literature and the closely related ‘diagnostic’ branch of legitimacy research – which evaluate real-world political systems and institutions on the basis of their own (and therefore external) standards, gleaned from various strands of normative democratic theory – may also be subsumed under that label, notwithstanding the fact that they are observation-based and rely on empirical indicators for the measurement of democratic quality (Beetham 1994; O’Donnell et al. 2004; Diamond and Morlino 2005; Abromeit and Stoiber 2007). By contrast, genuinely empirical legitimacy research is concerned with the factual acceptance of political systems and institutions, actors, or decisions by the citizens who are subjected to them, or, to be more precise, with the extent and (re)production of the kind of regime support that goes by the name of legitimacy. In other words, empirical legitimacy researchers assume an observer’s perspective, treating the legitimacy claims, beliefs, or assessments of political elites and citizens – as well as the practices and strategies that underpin the attribution or withdrawal of legitimacy – as social facts (Steffek 2003: 253; Barker 2007: 20–1).



Introduction 3


However, two further qualifications have to be added. First of all, while it appears plausible to apply the concept with a view to specific individual and collective political actors – David Easton’s ‘authorities’ (1965: chapter 13) – or even with a view to their respective policy decisions, most empirical work in the field, including our own, concentrates on ‘political communities’ or ‘regimes’ (Easton 1965: chapters 11, 12) as a whole with their basic principles and core institutions. This relatively narrow understanding of legitimation objects implies the not entirely unproblematic but widely shared assumption that citizens are able to distinguish between the incumbents of political offices and mandates on the one hand, and structural features of regimes like the democratic nation state on the other. As indicated by public opinion research, this conceptual distinction is not always watertight, but it may indeed be validated empirically (Westle 2007: 94–105). Moreover, as indicated above, the notion of support is broader than that of legitimacy. In the empirical strand of legitimacy research, the concept of legitimacy is usually tied to a particular form of regime support – namely, Easton’s ‘diffuse’ (1965: 273–4, 1975: 444–7) as opposed to his ‘specific’ variety of support (1965: 267–8, 1975: 438–9). The acceptance of political systems and the compliance with decisions emanating from them may, after all, be due to mere apathy and habitual obedience, to positive or negative incentives offered by the rulers, and to purely self-interested motives of the ruled, such as their fear of punishment and individual cost–benefit calculations (Weber 1978: 212–13; Barker 1990: 11). In a similar vein, the notion of specific support refers to a match between the demands of individuals or groups of citizens and a political system’s outputs or performance; extant public opinion research suggests that it is primarily directed at authorities and therefore unrelated to legitimacy – a regime may, in other words, enjoy this kind of support without being legitimate and vice versa. By contrast, diffuse support represents a ‘generalized attachment’ that ‘will normally be independent of outputs and performance in the short run’ (Easton 1975: 444–5). Unlike support based on a mere ‘quid pro quo’, which is somewhat precarious for this very reason, diffuse support is ‘not conditional upon specific returns’ (Easton 1965: 268, 272) and therefore likely to be more inert. It may be qualified as generalized in two key respects. First, it is grounded in a belief in ‘the appropriateness of the political order of things’ (Easton 1965: 279), that is, its conformity with moral values, legal principles, or other normative criteria. Second, it is a kind of support that extends beyond the authorities to the regime or political community as a whole (Easton 1975: 451). Yet



4

‘[w]here power is acquired and exercised according to justifiable rules, and with evidence of consent, we call it rightful or legitimate’ (Beetham 1991: 3). In qualifying such legitimacy-related beliefs and value orientations as the most important and effective foundations of diffuse support – because they are presumably able to establish political obligations and so give a regime ‘the prestige of being considered binding’ – Easton (1965: 276, 1975: 451) and others (Barker 1990: 21–6; Steffek 2003: 254; Gilley 2006b: 501) closely follow Max Weber (1978: 31). Defining legitimacy in this fashion, then, implies a link between the normative and empirical uses of the term, although the two may not be confounded: even as empirical concepts and phenomena, diffuse support and legitimacy are tied to normative benchmarks and positions, albeit those of citizens or rulers.2

Legitimacy and its foundations – historical developments and crisis diagnoses The necessity to justify the exalted position of rulers and political systems in that normatively grounded fashion, at least in part, is undoubtedly as old as political authority itself (Würtenberger 1982; Schorn-Schütte and Tode 2006; Zaller 2007). A regime that solely relies on force or the self-interest of its subjects to ensure compliance is vulnerable. Thus, according to Weber and Easton (1965: 281), authority is ‘a power relationship that exists only where there is a belief in the legitimacy of those who exercise the power’. In Europe, both Roman and medieval jurisprudence had already characterized a state of affairs as ‘legitimus’ that was in accordance with customs and traditions, ethical principles and (natural) law, or some notion of justice and public welfare, thus employing the word in a remarkably similar fashion to its modern users. From the Middle Ages onwards, the term essentially came to denote legal succession to the throne, (mostly) according to the principle of primogeniture and backed up by divine right. This enabled rulers to establish their legitimacy in an easily verifiable and (in most cases) uncontroversial fashion (Abromeit and Stoiber 2007: 35–6). Yet the specific normative criteria and justifications used to claim or evaluate the legitimacy of political systems and institutions may, of course, have individually, culturally or historically specific foundations. Weber’s (1978: 215–16) distinction between traditional, charismatic and legal–rational sources of legitimacy immediately comes to mind, as does Easton’s (1965: 287, 1975: 451) between ideological, structural, and personal foundations of legitimacy. In the Western world, these



Introduction 5


foundations became more problematic for the first time when different sources of legitimacy began to enter into serious competition with each other. The American and French revolutions ushered in a prolonged struggle between the Ancien Régime notion of legitimacy and a set of alternative normative criteria – legality and popular sovereignty, individual or collective self-determination, and so on – privileged by the proponents of liberal constitutionalism and the burgeoning democratic nation state. However, the extant literature is replete with the notion that we should usually expect a congruence, fit, or match between the political arrangements of a specific culture or epoch on the one hand, and the foundations of its legitimacy on the other. The notion is also implied in Weber’s famous typology, even though Weber himself (1978: 216) acknowledged that the legitimacy claims and beliefs prevailing in any specific context are likely to be mixed, and hence to draw on several or all of his ideal–typical legitimating motives. He nevertheless suggests that traditional sources of legitimacy have increasingly been sidetracked by charismatic ones, and eventually by legal–rational ones, as premodern societies gave way to the modern bureaucratic state. In a similar vein, much of the current literature assumes that the post-war ‘trente glorieuses’ of the democratic nation state have ushered in a firm match between the basic principles of that regime type and democratic or, in any case, rational foundations of legitimacy. The normative legitimacy of Western democracies has remained subject to formidable challenges throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century (Hirschman 1991), and the extent to which democratic government could be regarded as legitimate in an empirical sense has also been regularly questioned. A glance at twentieth and early twenty-first-century political thought yields three major waves of crisis diagnoses. The first occurred during the 1920s and 1930s – at a time when the democratic form of government was still anything but ‘the only kid on the block’ and indeed temporarily succumbed to its rivals – authoritarian and totalitarian regimes – throughout much of Europe (Laski 1933; Kirchheimer 1967; Schmitt 1993). This crisis literature primarily focused on the alleged flaws and legitimacy deficits of parliamentary democracy. A second peak is represented by the crisis literature of the 1970s – the first blemishes in the highly successful post-war model of economic growth and social development, and the events of 1968, had fostered concerns about the performance and legitimacy of capitalism and the Keynesian welfare state. While observers on the left (Offe 1972; Habermas



6

1975, 1979) diagnosed an insurmountable tension between the exploitative logic of capital accumulation and the legitimation function of the welfare state, authors further to the right on the ideological spectrum (Crozier et al. 1975; Hennis et al. 1977, 1979) were variously concerned about the ‘overload’ and ‘ungovernability’ of democratic regimes, about their leadership deficits and tendency to marginalize experts or political elites in general, and about a ‘moral decline’ allegedly fostered by too much democracy (overviews of this literature with its major strands and representatives are given in Kateb 1979; Kaase 1980; Birch 1984). Finally, globalization appears to have triggered the latest cyclical peak of crisis diagnoses. What distinguishes the third wave of crisis diagnoses from the earlier two, apart from various other differences in terms of historical context, is the particular causal story now offered to explain the alleged erosion of legitimacy in the Western world. The two older variations on the crisis theme essentially focused on internal flaws and contradictions of parliamentary democracy and capitalism against the backdrop of the ‘national constellation’ that had arguably characterized the political reality of established democracies up to the 1970s. By contrast, the more recent literature tends to identify the globalization-induced emergence of a so-called ‘post-national constellation’ (Habermas 2001b) as the main culprit for the performance and legitimacy crisis of the democratic nation state after its presumptive heyday in the post-war era (Hurrelmann and Leibfried et al. 2007a). According to the familiar line of reasoning developed in this body of work, economic globalization and the ongoing internationalization of political responsibilities undermine the erstwhile autonomy and capacity of the nation state as a whole, and even more so the decisionmaking and control functions of its representative institutions (Dahl 1994; Andersen and Burns 1996; Burns 1999). Because decisions are increasingly made within a web of multiple, interconnected centres and layers of political authority, governments have less autonomy vis-à-vis both international and non-state organizations and actors. The political communities of established democracies are increasingly confronted with a situation in which many decisions that affect their lives are taken in arenas beyond nation-state control. As a result, the accountability of governments to parliaments and, ultimately, their citizens suffers (Norton 1996; Maurer and Wessels 2001; Schütt-Wetschky 2001; Magalhães 2006). The circumvention or maceration of democratic principles and procedures in the wake of these trends appear to represent no less than a general erosion of democratic quality. Yet, if citizen support for the political orders and core institutions of the Western world



Introduction 7


is indeed linked with their democratic nature, the hollowing out of related principles and procedures should foster a legitimacy crisis. Such pessimistic assessments of democratic quality and legitimacy at the national level are compounded by the equally widespread perception that international regimes and supranational organizations – just like NGOs, corporations, and other non-state actors or (public–)private governance arrangements – are plagued by their own, and perhaps even more serious, legitimacy deficits. The sceptical view attributes the legitimacy deficits of internationalized governance arrangements primarily to the fact that they have no, or little, democratic quality and are unlikely to obtain much of it.3 This line of reasoning, in other words, diagnoses a kind of globalization-induced negative-sum game in which waning support for the democratic nation state – itself largely due to internationalization – is exacerbated by the questionable legitimacy of those organizations and actors to which political authority has increasingly shifted (see Conclusion). More sanguine views exist but are clearly in a minority position. They usually submit the argument that globalization is linked with yet another shift in the historically ‘appropriate’ criteria of legitimation, namely, a shift from input-oriented to output-based criteria such as effectiveness (Dahl 1994; Scharpf 1999: 6–28, 2000: 107–15) or the protection of human rights (Beck 2005: chapter 8). Hence we should observe a transformation rather than the feared erosion of legitimacy at the national level, while the legitimacy of internationalized governance arrangements such as the EU should be based on different foundations altogether, and hence should be much less problematic than suggested by the crisis literature (Majone 1998, 1999, 2001; Moravcsik 2002, 2005).

Legitimacy in the age of globalization – towards an empirical analysis Closer examination of the latest crisis diagnoses and their more sanguine counterparts, however, reveals that both are open to challenges. In much of this work, the normative and empirical notions of legitimacy – an actor’s and an observer’s perspective on the phenomenon – are not properly disentangled from each other, and many supposedly empirical contributions have, rather, a diagnostic character. The sceptical accounts of Anthony Birch (1984), Max Kaase (1980), and George Kateb (1979) have exposed the widespread confusion between a diagnostic and a truly empirical perspective in the neo-Marxist crisis



8

literature of the 1970s and its conservative equivalents, and they correctly point out that the evidential basis of this literature was at best rudimentary. As Kateb wryly remarks, many of the crisis diagnoses reviewed in his contribution, ‘[f]ailing to see what their theory predisposes them to want, ... claim[ed] to see a legitimation crisis’ (720). Much of the current literature on the globalization-induced erosion or transformation of legitimacy in the Western world is vulnerable to similar criticism. Quite frequently, it remains unclear whether crisis diagnoses are to be understood as normative (that is, the nation state and its institutions have become unacceptable because they no longer satisfy democratic or other external legitimation standards) or as empirical (the political orders of the Western world are no longer supported by their own citizens). Where diagnoses are indeed meant to be empirical, their evidential basis often remains equally unclear. A typical formulation in the vein of the ‘erosion of legitimacy’ hypothesis, for instance, states that without an effective redefinition of representative democracy’s role or function, its profound incapacity and marginalization are not only likely to continue, but to contribute to a loss of faith in and support for democratic institutions. It will become increasingly difficult to maintain the public image of the centrality of parliamentary democracy in the face of growing democratic deficits and substantial gaps between presumed responsibilities and actual capabilities of governing. (Burns 1999: 182)4 In order to substantiate the empirical inferences and causal arguments implied in this and similar propositions, one would, above all, have to show (a) that citizens (fully) recognize the impact of globalization on the nation state’s performance, as well as the link between globalization and the phenomenon of deparliamentarization, (b) that support for political orders in the Western world is indeed primarily ‘anchored’ in evaluations of representative institutions, and (c) that democratic benchmarks are privileged when the legitimacy of these political systems is evaluated. All this may well be the case. Without adequate corroborating evidence, however, such claims are no more than expressions of the normative claim that ‘no matter how often defeated, democracy represents the ultimate legitimacy’ (Apter 1991: 463). To be sure, this premise is today hegemonic among political theorists. As an empirical proposition, however, it amounts to suggesting that the appropriate benchmarks for the evaluation of the democratic nation state trickle down from the



Introduction 9

academic sphere to citizens in an unproblematic fashion, that there is a societal (quasi-)consensus on them, and hence that the kind of match between regime type and evaluation standards alluded to above does indeed exist.5 The optimistic scenarios which claim the growing importance of new evaluation standards – whose designation as ‘democratic’ is at the very least questionable from a normative point of view – usually do not fare any better. They, too, tend to assume rather than demonstrate the alleged transformation of legitimacy. In short, most or all of the diagnoses briefly reviewed here are formulated against the backdrop of thinly veiled normative positions, whether anchored in the mainstream of democratic theory or not. Of course, there is nothing wrong with such a normative or diagnostic orientation in legitimacy research, and the study at the core of this book will obviously have to use concepts and consider questions that are grounded or raised in democratic theory. However, we intend to treat the legitimacy of the democratic nation state as much as possible as a social fact and, moreover, start with the premise that the debate between the proponents of crisis diagnoses and their more optimistic counterparts has not yet been settled if understood as an empirical debate.

A typology of crisis scenarios If one considers both the extent to which a given regime is supported and the more or less democratic foundations of its legitimacy, one may actually distinguish three crisis scenarios and one reference category, namely, secure democratic legitimacy (Table 1.1). A regime may be legitimated or delegitimated – considered legitimate or illegitimate – by (most of) its citizens or observers, and on the basis of (mostly) democratic or non-democratic evaluation standards.6 This typology could, in principle, be used to categorize a regime’s normative or empirical legitimacy, and it may be employed in a cross-sectional or longitudinal perspective for a comparison of different political systems or institutions, and for an analysis of change over time, as in this book. As illustrated by Table 1.1, the ‘erosion of legitimacy’ hypothesis corresponds to our type I – the delegitimation of a regime or some of its core institutions on the basis of democratic criteria. Yet this is not the only scenario that appears plausible against the backdrop of globalization. As indicated above, the more sanguine minority view in the literature on globalization and European integration rejects the dominant ‘erosion of legitimacy’ hypothesis, positing instead that the transformation of the nation state and the emergence of internationalized or (public–) private



10 Democracy’s Deep Roots

Introduction 11 Types of legitimacy crisis Democratic benchmarks

Non-democratic benchmarks

Delegitimation

Legitimacy crisis I: Erosion of democratic legitimacy, crisis of democratic institutions

Legitimation

Secure democratic legitimacy

Legitimacy crisis II: Collapse of democratic legitimacy, crisis of democratic institutions and of democracy’s normative foundations Legitimacy crisis III: Transformation of democratic legitimacy, crisis of democracy’s normative foundations

governance arrangements may have coincided with the rise of new sources of legitimacy. In other words, it puts forward the idea of a new match between institutional arrangements and legitimation standards in the ‘post-national constellation’. If this transformation of legitimacy were indeed taking place, support for established democracies and their core institutions should thus be stable, albeit on the basis of nondemocratic criteria (type III). Viewed from a normative angle, however, such a development may itself be interpreted as a crisis phenomenon inasmuch as it represents a shift away from evaluation standards related to democratic quality. One scenario that a transformation of this kind might indicate or forebode is ‘post-democracy’ – a state of affairs in which democracy survives as a façade but is in effect a mere spectacle, with citizens playing a ‘passive, quiescent, even apathetic part’ and ‘politics [being] really shaped in private by interaction between elected governments and elites that overwhelmingly represent business interests’ (Crouch 2004). However, the empirical proposition that there has been a shift from democratic input to non-democratic output criteria of legitimation must, of course, also be substantiated. Like the ‘erosion of legitimacy’ hypothesis, it may overestimate the role of democratic criteria in the heyday of the nation state. Conversely, the view that output-based, non-democratic criteria are normatively unobjectionable equivalents to input-oriented, democratic ones need not be shared widely enough by citizens to prevent a decline in actual regime support today. A third crisis scenario – which would have to be considered particularly alarming from a normative and an empirical perspective alike – might therefore be observed, namely, the loss of regime support combined



Table 1.1


with a shift to non-democratic criteria, that is, a collapse of democratic legitimacy (type II). Both the type I and II crisis diagnoses and the more sanguine type III scenario thus involve far-reaching empirical claims with regard to levels and foundations of legitimacy, and their change over time. Upon further inspection, however, these claims often appear to be quite unsubstantiated and to rest more strongly on their authors’ implicit normative positions than on reliable evidence. Hence it may even be the case that the extent and foundations of legitimacy in the Western world have remained stable and primarily democratic, thus belying all three scenarios of crisis or change. Few contributions also seem to envisage more than one of these scenarios – and, by implication, there is a tendency to present one of them (usually type I) as the situation or trend that prevails more or less uniformly in all established democracies. Thus we not only have reason to enquire which of the outlined scenarios is closest to reality. Rather, the very existence of such a uniform trend has to be probed as well. As indicated above, our own reading of the empirical literature suggests that the jury is still out on both questions. The ambiguity of findings reported by the extant literature may therefore be attributed to the fact that there is no single pervasive trend, be it an erosion, a collapse, or a mere transformation of legitimacy. It may also stem from the specific methodological biases of the different strands of empirical legitimacy research, or from the confusion between normative and empirical perspectives. More work – both conceptual and empirical – is therefore required, including work that explores untrodden paths of legitimacy research, such as the text analytical perspective on legitimation discourses that we propose.

Plan of the book This book, then, probes the ‘erosion of legitimacy’, ‘collapse of legitimacy’, and ‘transformation of legitimacy’ hypotheses against the backdrop of a comparative study of legitimation discourses – that is, legitimacy-related communication – in four Western democracies. We are concerned with legitimation as an empirical phenomenon and, moreover, focus on the legitimacy of national political systems and institutions, although the conclusion will briefly explore questions related to the legitimacy of internationalized or (public–)private governance arrangements. While our study is certainly anchored in democratic theory, as suggested by the crucial distinction between democratic and



12

non-democratic legitimation patterns introduced above, normative questions sensu stricto will therefore receive short shrift. Chapter 2 outlines the theoretical rationale of research into the communicative dimension of legitimacy, contrasting this novel approach with the two most prominent strands of extant research in the field. We discuss a number of conceptual and methodological issues pertaining to the study of empirical legitimacy and its foundations, and introduce an analytical framework for the examination of legitimation discourses. Finally, the research design, methodological orientation, and hypotheses of our own empirical study are presented. Chapters 3 to 5 are devoted to the empirical analysis of our textual data. Chapter 3 looks into whether there are indications of an erosion or collapse of legitimacy (our crisis types I and II) in the four countries examined – that is, a shift towards the delegitimation of their political systems and institutions. Moreover, it explores the intensity, cyclical nature, and issue contexts of legitimacy-related communication. Chapter 4 turns to the foundations of legitimacy, the use of democratic v. non-democratic and input v. output criteria in legitimation discourses, thus enabling us to distinguish between our type I and II scenarios, and to probe the ‘transformation of legitimacy’ hypothesis. Both chapters together, then, permit differentiated inferences on the nature of legitimation styles, and allow us to verify the emergence of one or another of our three crisis scenarios in the four national discourses under comparison. Chapter 5 more closely examines the strategies of (de)legitimation identified in our material, and especially relegitimation strategies used to avert or overcome crises. Three types of such relegitimation strategies are distinguished. The conclusion begins with a summary of our findings on the state of empirical legitimacy in Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the United States. The bulk of the chapter will, however, be devoted to a discussion of the import and generalizability of these findings. Moreover, ways to adapt our framework for research on the communicative legitimation of internationalized or (public–)private governance arrangements are suggested. In a nutshell, we argue that the democratic nation state continues to be a legitimate form of government, and that discursive support for it remains to a considerable extent based on democratic criteria. To the extent that delegitimation occurs, it tends to be concentrated in a limited number of institutions or actor groups, and to be countered by powerful relegitimation strategies and mechanisms. Hence there is more stability



Introduction 13


in the levels and foundations of regime support than the outlined crisis diagnoses suggest, and evidence for a pervasive and uniform legitimacy crisis of Western democracies is scarce or at best inconclusive. Rather, the four media discourses examined are characterized by remarkably different legitimation styles. In conceptual and methodological terms, we make the case for an empirical perspective that does justice to the multifaceted and dynamic character of legitimacy and legitimation, and notably to its communicative dimension. Finally, we submit that the legitimacy of the democratic nation state in the age of globalization – while being surprisingly robust – is more and more likely to be reproduced in a relational fashion, with a comparative view to the legitimacy of international political or even economic regimes.



14

The Communicative Dimension of Legitimacy: A Text Analytical Perspective

Three different scenarios of change – each arguably representing a distinct form of crisis – dominate current research on the legitimacy of the democratic nation state. One may speak of an erosion or collapse of legitimacy (our type I and II scenarios) when citizens withdraw their support for a political order. By contrast, a mere transformation of legitimacy (type III) may be diagnosed where a regime continues to enjoy popular support while the democratic foundations of its legitimacy are superseded by non-democratic ones. But is there indeed a clear trend among Western democracies in any of these three directions, away from secure democratic legitimacy? How can the scope or nature of legitimacy be gauged to begin with, and how are the foundations of legitimacy reproduced, challenged, or transformed? This book differs from most of the extant literature in two important respects. First, we treat legitimacy as a strictly empirical phenomenon, drawing on a comparative study of Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the United States. The normative assessment of legitimacy in these four political systems and of their democratic quality is largely beyond our purview. Second, we break new ground by focusing on the communicative dimension of legitimacy. The underlying argument is that the legitimation or delegitimation of political systems – the (re)production, withdrawal, or transformation of regime support – is an essentially linguistic phenomenon, and hence may be captured by examining legitimation discourses. The present chapter introduces the theoretical rationale and analytical framework of our empirical study. In the first section, we review traditional approaches to legitimacy research and contrast them with 15 10.1057/9780230275331 - Democracy's Deep Roots, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner


2

16


Dimensions of legitimacy: Attitudes, behaviour, and communication All empirical perspectives on legitimacy are faced with five basic sets of research questions. The first set of questions relates to the elements or representatives of political systems that may or should be considered as bearers of legitimacy, or objects of legitimation. Most empirical studies in the field, including our own, concentrate on political systems or regimes as a whole, including their core institutions and basic principles but excluding authorities – the incumbents of government offices and parliamentary mandates – as well as policies from their purview. However, going beyond this a priori focus on the regime level, one also has to probe empirically which specific regime elements or institutions are viewed as legitimation objects by citizens or political elites, and hence are perceived as deserving or requiring the kind of support that we call legitimacy. We examine this question in Chapter 3, against the backdrop of a hierarchy of legitimation objects developed for that purpose. Measuring the extent to which political orders are supported – levels of legitimacy – comes next: how legitimate is a particular regime or institution? Is citizen support – for instance, for Western democracies and their parliaments – stable, eroding, or growing? Such levels of legitimacy may be gauged in a cross-sectional fashion, highlighting similar ities and differences, or in a longitudinal fashion, with a view to stability and change. This question will also be dealt with in Chapter 3. Examining the foundations of legitimacy is the third major item on our empirical research agenda: why is a political system or institution considered legitimate or illegitimate? What are the sources of pertinent legitimacy beliefs? Which normative criteria and arguments – for instance, related to a regime’s accountability, distributive justice, or effectiveness – are used to make and justify supportive or critical evaluations? Have such patterns of legitimation changed over time, and do they differ between political systems? Again, this set of questions may be examined in a cross-sectional or longitudinal perspective. Chapter 4 of the book tackles them on the basis of an empirically grounded classification of legitimation patterns.



a text analytical perspective. In the second section, we introduce an analytical framework for the examination of legitimation discourses. Finally, the research design, methodological orientation, and hypotheses of our study are presented.

Another group of questions relates to the causes and effects of legitimacy. Where regime support and legitimacy beliefs are considered as independent variables, one might probe the extent to which they actually foster compliance or ensure the stability and performance of democracies, as hypothesized by Easton (1965: 156–7) and others (Lipset 1958, 1993; Gilley 2006b). Our book, however, assumes the opposite perspective, treating legitimacy as a dependent variable (Gilley 2006a). It examines the hypothesis that globalization has fostered an erosion, collapse, or transformation of legitimacy and its foundations, as well as the alternative hypothesis that any such trends are mediated by national institutional arrangements, or by political and discursive cultures. However, once we bid farewell to the notion that legitimacy is a kind of ‘essence’ that a regime may or may not possess, depending on the extent to which it lives up to external normative benchmarks, we have to establish how legitimacy – the ‘right to rule’ (Gilley 2009) – is reproduced, challenged, or transformed in the first place. Our final set of questions, therefore, does not relate to legitimacy as an attribute or quality that academic observers, citizens, or political elites ascribe to regimes and their institutions but to the dynamics or mechanisms of legitimation, and hence to the practices and strategies that underpin the ascription or contestation of legitimacy (Barker 2001: 21–2). The term ‘legitimation’, then, reminds us that the (re)production or transformation of legitimacy is a process – regime support and its foundations are never fully or permanently secure, and hence might be conceptualized as the temporary outcomes of incessant conflicts and debates between the supporters and challengers of political systems and their institutions. These debates are about the importance of various legitimation objects and the appropriateness of different – for instance, democratic v. non-democratic – legitimation patterns, and ultimately about the (non)acceptability of regimes and institutions in the light of such criteria. The essentially communicative or discursive character of legitimacy-related practices is, of course, the premise of the empirical study presented in this book. The issue of legitimation strategies will be explored in Chapter 5. How, then, may the various aspects of legitimacy and legitimation be studied? Returning to Beetham’s definition (1991: 16), a regime is legitimate when it ‘conforms to established rules’, when these ‘rules can be justified by reference to beliefs shared by both dominant and subordinate’, and ‘there is evidence of consent by the subordinate’. This understanding of legitimacy is in line with, for instance, Easton’s (1965: 161–4) – and ours as well – in presupposing that the term indeed refers to an



The Communicative Dimension of Legitimacy 17

observable, even quantifiable, phenomenon. But it also highlights three conceptual and methodological issues that must be borne in mind when designing – or assessing – empirical legitimacy research. First of all, legitimacy is context-bound – it is generated or challenged against the backdrop of specific institutional arrangements and political cultures (‘established rules’, ‘shared beliefs’). Second, both political elites and citizens (‘dominant and subordinate’) play a role in the legitimation of a regime. Finally, much hinges on the kind of indicators used to gauge levels and foundations of legitimacy: how can we measure the ‘sense of being bound – who feels it, how it is expressed, how it is denied ...’ (Mulligan 2004: 478)? If anything, empirical research on democracies, and hence on ‘government based on the consent of the governed’ (Easton 1975: 439), will have to devote even more attention to the question of how to best capture actual ‘expressions of gratification or discontent’ (443). In the following, we review and evaluate different approaches to empirical legitimacy research in the light of these aspects (Table 2.1). The two approaches that have so far dominated the field are considered first, namely, public opinion research – which focuses on political attitudes as ‘evidence of consent’ – and research on political behaviour. We show that each of these research traditions draws on a specific method and highlights a particular dimension of legitimacy; each is also characterized by specific comparative advantages, biases, and shortcomings. Table 2.1

Dimensions of and approaches to empirical legitimacy Political… Attitudes

Behaviour

Communication

Method

Public opinion surveys

Text (content, discourse) analysis

… produces:

reactive, ‘artificial’ data legitimacy beliefs no no

Observation of (non-) conventional participation; protest event analysis less reactive, ‘natural’ data

less reactive, ‘natural’ data

acts of support or dissent yes yes, no

legitimacy assessments = legitimation statements yes yes

… captures: … context-sensitive? … process and ‘interactive’ perspective?





Legitimacy beliefs: The attitudinal dimension The first and without any doubt preferred approach in the field concentrates on ‘rightfulness “as believed by citizens” ’ (Gilley 2006b: 502), that is, legitimacy-related political attitudes and value orientations. Conceptually, this body of work largely builds on the pioneering work of Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (1963, 1980), and of David Easton (1965). Methodologically, the comparative study of legitimacy beliefs in this tradition has almost exclusively relied on survey-based public opinion research (Dogan 1988; Westle 2007). The ontological and epistemological biases of the survey method have been sharply criticized by a number of authors (Bourdieu 1984; Potter and Wetherell 1987; Dryzek 1988; Rosenberg 1989; Dryzek and Berejikian 1993; Potter 2001). However, such all-out criticism does not appear warranted.1 Thus we question neither the general usefulness of survey-based public opinion research and its undeniably sophisticated methodological instruments nor the importance of studying the dimension of attitudes and beliefs in the context of legitimacy research. There can hardly be any doubt that public opinion research has played a major role in the field over the last couple of decades. Notably, it has suggested and operationalized a number of key concepts and indicators, and collected a wealth of highly reliable cross-sectional and longitudinal data, especially on the democracies of the Western world (Kaase and Newton 1995, together with the other volumes in the Beliefs in Government series; Dalton 1999, 2004; Nye et al. 1998; Norris 1999a; Pharr and Putnam 2000). Two kinds of (closed-ended) question items tend to be used to probe individual legitimacy beliefs in national surveys or cross-national ones such as the Eurobarometer and World Values surveys. The first aims to directly measure respondents’ support for political systems and a range of their core institutions. People might, for instance, be asked whether they are ‘proud of many things about [their] form of government’ or, by contrast, ‘can’t find much ... to be proud of’ (Weatherford 1992: 163). The second kind of question items attempts more explicitly to tap into the underlying beliefs by inviting respondents to agree or disagree with propositions that evaluate systems and their institutions in the



The rationale and contours of our own perspective – and how it may be used to compensate for the shortcomings of the other two – are outlined next; this novel approach zeroes in on public discourses, examined by way of text analytical methods, to answer the kinds of research questions enumerated above (Schneider et al. 2007).


light of specific normative criteria. Respondents might, for instance, be confronted with the proposition that ‘people like [them] don’t have any say about what the government does’ or be asked to what extent they ‘feel ... well represented’ (Weatherford 1992: 161–2). Evaluation standards such as popular sovereignty and representativeness, as in our examples, or any other criteria may be offered to respondents in this fashion. The aggregate frequency distributions of individual responses to such question items, then, arguably indicate high or low levels and more or less democratic foundations of legitimacy in the given sample of respondents and the population it represents. Besides descriptive inferences on the ‘net balance’ (Easton 1965: 169) and motives of regime support, the survey method permits the analysis of correlations between individual legitimacy beliefs and socio-demographic variables such as class, education, gender, and religious faith, or between aggregate legitimacy and regime performance. Thus it lends itself to causal inferences as well. There is no space here for a thorough discussion of the many important findings that the voluminous body of single-country and large-scale comparative research in this tradition has yielded. Much of it indicates shrinking levels of trust in, or growing dissatisfaction with, the political institutions and elites of Western democracies, and so, at first glance, provides corroborating evidence for our type I or II scenarios – an erosion or collapse of legitimacy. However, it also suggests a number of differentiations and qualifications. Authors like Paul Sniderman (1981), Bettina Westle (1988, 2007), Pippa Norris (1999b), and Richard Hofferbert and Hans-Dieter Klingemann (2001) have pointed to a key ambiguity of levels of legitimacy measured in the described way. A line of research pioneered by Westle, Norris, and others suggests that a distinction between beliefs related to the ‘idea’ of democracy (or any other form of government) and assessments of democracy ‘as is’ proves to be highly relevant as far as objects of legitimation are concerned. A number of surveys, in fact, indicate relatively high support for the ‘idea’ but dissatisfaction with the performance of the specific version of democracy (the welfare state, federalism, and so on) experienced by respondents (Westle 2007: 105–19). However, Westle also suggests a ‘hard core’ of opposition to the idea itself and the possibility of a globalization-induced escalation. Thus mere dissatisfaction with national policies – which appear more and more ineffective against the backdrop of globalization – might foster an erosion of support for authorities, the current regime, and ultimately even democracy as an idea. In any case, one should obviously not mistake genuine anti-system attitudes with dissatisfaction that merely



20

stems from a perceived gap between democratic aspirations and political reality. This ambiguity on the side of legitimation objects – which we are going to tackle by distinguishing between different types and tiers (Chapter 3) – also underscores the need to examine the foundations of legitimacy, or legitimation patterns. Sniderman argues that much presumptive evidence for the growing suspicion of citizens towards their institutions and elites, and hence, supposedly, for declining levels of legitimacy, remains inconclusive, for ‘to know how citizens feel about government – to know more are alienated and fewer allegiant – is not enough. The quality of their judgment matters, too’. In his words, a ‘balanced’ sceptical judgment may well be in line with ‘the habits of mind that favor democratic politics’ (1981: 2), thus indicating loyalty rather than a legitimacy crisis. To the extent that the democratic foundations of legitimacy remain essentially intact, and democracy as an idea is largely beyond criticism, an apparent erosion of legitimacy may have more to do with a better educated citizenry that feels more politically competent, active, and mobilized than in the past, knows more about its interests and demands, and has a clearer understanding of the extent to which they are met; the existence of such a ‘critical citizenry’ that no longer blindly follows its leaders may, in turn, be viewed as a democratic virtue rather than as a threat to the legitimacy of the nation state and its institutions (Norris 1999b). On the other hand, there are forms of allegiance that one might interpret as crisis indicators. A similar reasoning, of course, underpins Klingemann and Hofferbert’s distinction between satisfied and dissatisfied (anti-)democrats, as introduced in Chapter 1, and our own typology of crisis scenarios. What, then, is wrong or, put more cautiously, inadequate about a focus on the attitudinal dimension and an exclusive reliance on the survey method in the field of empirical legitimacy research? We follow Richard Merelman (1989), David Beetham (1991), Rodney Barker (2001: 34), and various other scholars of political cultures and legitimacy in arguing that public opinion research is unable to fully and satisfactorily address the catalogue of research questions outlined above. For us, the key problem is not even the rather bewildering array of concepts that has grown out of, or been used alongside, Easton’s basic notions of legitimacy and support: alienation and allegiance, confidence, cynicism, (dis)affection, (dis)satisfaction, (dis)trust, identification, loyalty, and so on. Which of these concepts – if any – are tied to legitimacy, and how exactly they relate to that term and to each other, has been discussed at some length by public opinion researchers. We side with those authors who have





defended the use of a few key concepts, namely, diffuse support and legitimacy, in these debates.2 In our view, the biases and shortcomings of public opinion research stem largely from the reactive and – by definition – decontextualized character of the survey method. The survey encounter is situated in ‘a vacuum of both social relations and history’ (Roberto Franzosi, in Koçer 2005: 4), built on the ‘assumption of regime-type neutrality’ (Gilley 2006b: 520), and forcing ‘the respondent ... to construe the world in ways required by the question[s] posed by investigators’ (Merelman 1989: 482). Rather than treating the citizens of a given political system as actors in their real-world social environment, the stimulus–response logic of the method reduces them to the status of respondents, or, worse, disaggregates them into a bunch of socio-demographic and attitudinal variables whose correlation is then examined. As suggested above, the typical questionnaire forces respondents to assess a fixed set of legitimation objects, and to draw on a number of preselected criteria for that purpose. First of all, this approach entails the considerable risk of underestimating the degree of apathy, habitual obedience, or specific support among respondents. Their responses to supposedly legitimacy-related question items are, in many cases, likely to be disguised non-responses: unless they refuse to answer, even indifferent or self-interested respondents are prompted to evaluate a regime and its institutions in terms of generalizable criteria, and will thus be counted as having genuine legitimacy beliefs. Second, and worse, they are forced to do so in a way that corresponds to the researchers’ own (explicitly stated or implicit) normative understanding of what constitutes more or less important objects and more or less appropriate patterns of legitimation. Thus a survey – at least one that does not contain open-ended question items – does not enable researchers to examine which institutions respondents themselves view as more or less central, or which ones they focus on when they evaluate the legitimacy of their political system as a whole, (inter)acting in their own environment, and without being prompted by questionnaire stimuli. Likewise, a survey does not enable researchers to tap into the actual foundations of legitimacy beliefs, or to identify unexpected and idiosyncratic evaluation criteria, including supposedly inappropriate or irrational criteria. Yet, in order to uncover the meaning of survey responses, ‘it is necessary to explore common sense or the lay knowledge that people bring on the issues in question’ and to ‘understand the resources or representations that people draw upon in making such judgements and opinions’ (Gaskell and Bauer



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2001: 8). In the words of Claus Offe (2006: 26), ‘the sense of democratic legitimacy does not just depend upon a person’s having a positive attitude, but depends ... upon the arguments and reasons given for, and accepted as effectively supporting and validating, the democratic regime form and its institutions’. These shortcomings are, moreover, closely linked with the operationalization of empirical legitimacy as an unweighted aggregate of individual survey responses. But do the ensuing frequency distributions represent adequate measures of levels and foundations of legitimacy? Based on the normative postulate that (democratic) legitimacy must be grounded in the support of (a majority of) citizens with equal rights, this operationalization has a superficial plausibility. Interestingly enough, however, even David Easton – the major theoretical reference point of much of this literature – reminds us that a political ‘community is usually something more than just an aggregate’ (1965: 177). He therefore links his discussion of legitimacy beliefs and diffuse support with the notion of ‘politically relevant’ members ‘who can be said to count or whose attitudes need to be taken into consideration in the processing of demands’ (154). Very much in line with Weber, he further argues that a ‘few powerful members, such as an active political elite, a military cadre, or an organized intelligentsia, may be able to make their positive or negative support count far more than high levels of support from unorganized milieus’ (167). Rodney Barker, too, questions the ‘assumption of equal citizen importance’ (Gilley 2006b: 520) as unwarranted, carrying home the point that the beliefs and assessments of more or less politically conscious and efficacious groups or individuals ‘matter’ to varying degrees: There has been an assumption that ... legitimacy is a democratic phenomenon, to be assessed by counting heads in the same way that elections count votes. But how far is legitimacy a relationship of equal significance for all subjects, how much is its significance for both state and subject differentiated according to the power or status of the persons or groups concerned? (Barker 1990: 15) If some people’s attitudes and legitimacy beliefs are, in fact, more important than others, then the aggregate frequency distributions of individual survey responses are, at best, ‘residues’ or ‘pale shadows of [the] collective representations’ that underpin legitimacy at the system level – in the worst case, they may be no more than ‘arbitrary impositions’ or ‘reifications’ (Merelman 1989: 480, 482–3). Even if we were to




concede that equally weighted responses provide us with fairly reliable indicators of legitimacy levels and foundations most of the time, the decontextualized survey method is – by definition – far removed from the actual practices that underpin the legitimation of political systems. We need to establish how legitimacy beliefs are (re)produced, challenged, or transformed by citizens and political actors who engage with each other in real-world contexts. With Merelman, we may observe that ‘the odds against any two respondents in a national survey actually interacting with each other are formidable’ (1989: 482). The ‘genetic aspect’ of legitimation is thus essentially ignored by ‘modern survey research [which] measures attitudes and opinions, not the modalities of arriving at and holding fast to these attitudes, nor the reasons supporting opinions at the individual level’ (Offe 2006: 27). According to Barker (1990: 125), finally, ‘different sections of the population may be involved in different kinds of legitimate relationships with government’. These relationships between citizens, political elites, and institutional contexts have to be examined and understood once our attention turns to the aspect of legitimation; they are, however, systematically neglected by public opinion research.3 The same is true for the practices or forms of behaviour that underpin the (de)legitimation of political systems and institutions. As Easton himself acknowledges, in the vernacular the term ‘support’ refers more often to behaviour than to attitudes (1975: 436). In his own words, attitudes are no more than ‘covert’ indicators, while consent expressed through observable behaviour amounts to ‘overt’ support (1965: 159). As he further concedes, attitudes are at best indicators of behavioural dispositions, ‘an imputed state of feelings that will have a high probability of displaying themselves through supportive or hostile actions’ (1965: 160). But what ultimately counts with regard to legitimacy levels is ‘the input of effective support, those attitudes which members are ready and able to express in overt and therefore telling behavior’ (1965: 168). The extent to which dispositions are translated into action may in turn vary with the circumstances and, in any case, represents an empirical question that cannot be answered on the basis of the survey method alone. To sum up, there are many question marks around the usefulness of attitudinal data as ‘evidence of consent’, and, moreover, these ‘surface elements’ (Merelman 1989: 465) of deep cultural structures do not appear to be of much use in the study of legitimation practices. A survey-based examination of pertinent attitudes and beliefs is, then, arguably a necessary component of empirical legitimacy research but hardly sufficient.





Another important approach to empirical legitimacy research has, therefore, concentrated on the observation of various types of (non-) conventional political behaviour that may be interpreted as acts of support or dissent. The methodological and theoretical rationales for focusing on this second dimension of legitimacy ensue directly from the shortcomings of public opinion research outlined above. First of all, observing instances of social (inter)action in their realworld contexts enables researchers to collect ‘natural’ data (Koopmans and Statham 1999: 205). Many of the behavioural indicators gleaned from the observation of social practices and events are, moreover, conveniently measurable and even quantifiable. As in the field of public opinion research, there are now quite a few cross-national datasets amenable to large-scale comparative work. The public opinion and observational approaches may also be combined. Anderson et al. (2005), for instance, consider election and survey data to explore the role of voting and elections in the creation and maintenance of regime support among citizens on the winning and losing sides; according to Muller et al. (1982), ‘[m]icro-level anti-system political behaviour is a well-known correlate of individual legitimacy views, and this finding can be appropriately extended to the macro-level’ (cited in Gilley 2006b: 508). In a theoretical vein, the alleged link between (il)legitimacy and (non-) compliance is the key justification for this observational approach. After all, from Weber to Easton and beyond, authors have suggested that legitimacy – defined as a normatively grounded and explicit form of regime support – primarily matters because it creates obligations and therefore enhances the chance that people ‘behave in conformity with decisions made by political authorities and with the rules of the regime’ (Easton 1975: 454). If so, data on the extent to which a regime is able to sustain high levels of compliance may well be viewed as the ultimate – and in a way, the clearest – evidence of legitimacy. Conversely, where compliance is outright denied, as in revolutions and other major forms of political upheaval, it appears safe to diagnose a regime’s illegitimacy. Of course, such events are highly infrequent, and more fine-grained behavioural indicators are needed for the study of Western democracies, whose legitimacy challenges are undoubtedly of a more subtle type. Yet established democracies, too, are occasionally faced with protest and bouts of civil unrest, which may be violent. The non-conventional forms of collective action employed by social movements – and especially protest activities – are grounded in ‘a set of demands, opinions, beliefs and



Acts of support and dissent: The behavioural dimension

interests’ that challenge political authority (Koopmans and Statham 1999: 208). One may, then, go one step further and consider the very existence of protest movements, their membership, or the nature, frequency, and visibility of their activities as indicators of challenges to the legitimacy of political elites and institutions (Haunss 2007).4 Easton (1965: 163), in fact, already proposes the use of a ‘ratio of deviance to conformity’ as an indicator of overt support, and, according to Gilley (2006b: 508), the ‘extent to which citizens feel that they must, or are forced to, use violence, as opposed to regular and legal forms of social protest, should be a good effect indicator of justification failures’. Ultimately, any behaviour of the ‘exit’ (voting with one’s feet ... ) or ‘voice’ type (Hirschman 1970) that may be interpreted as a sign of citizens’ dissatisfaction with the ‘product quality’ of their regime – be that behaviour non-conventional and violent or not – seems apposite. To be sure, most of the burgeoning literature on social movements and protest events has not explicitly dealt with questions of legitimacy – that is, with the legitimacy of political systems and institutions rather than the justifiability of movements themselves and their activities – but it has arguably become an important data source for legitimacy researchers (Gurr 1971; Tarrow 1994, 1995; Rucht et al. 1999; McAdam et al. 2001; Koopmans and Rucht 2002; Tilly 2004). Instead of protest behaviour and acts of dissent, the observational approach may just as well focus on conventional forms of behaviour indicating consent, ‘loyalty’ (Hirschman 1970), or support (Barnes and Kaase 1979; van Deth 2006). The participation in elections, being a member of and voting for democratic rather than anti-system parties, the ‘payment of quasi-voluntary taxes for the socio-economic structure’, or accepting the burden of military service and going to war for one’s country have all been proposed as behavioural indicators of ‘a citizen’s recognition of the state’s right to hold political authority and an acceptance, at least in general, to be bound to obey the decisions that result’ (Gilley 2006b: 503, 508; see also Levi 1989, 1997; Klingemann and Fuchs 1995; Norris 2002; Putnam 2000, 2002, 2004). Whether protest or affirmative behaviour is examined, the observational approach, then, has the advantage that it produces indicators of legitimacy that cross the threshold separating mere attitudes and behavioural dispositions, as revealed by surveys, from overtly expressed dissent or support. In both versions of the approach, apathetic citizens are unlikely to be taken into account as if they were holders of genuine legitimacy beliefs. Moreover, since citizens and their political behaviour are observed in real-world contexts, the approach brings us much




closer to actual (de)legitimation processes and their key actors, notably including social movements, than the survey method. Where are the limits of this second approach to empirical legitimacy research? The major problem, in our view, stems from the fact that while (non-)compliance, at first glance, appears to be a plausible enough indicator of legitimacy, the two phenomena may ultimately not be confounded. As Easton acknowledges, ‘[n]ot all compliance need reflect supportive sentiments; not all violations of rules need be nonsupportive’ (1975: 454).5 Thus not all forms of compliance indicate legitimacy as defined above, not all forms of protest signal the illegitimacy of political systems or institutions, and support for or dissent with a regime may be expressed through a range of disconcertingly similar action types. As Easton further recognizes, we need to examine the ‘motives or intentions behind the conformity or violation’ (1975: 455). Without an understanding of the motives or justifications for political behaviour, and of the context ‘in which relevant attitudes and behavior appear’ (455), we cannot discern whether they are tied to genuine legitimacy beliefs, and hence linked with underlying normative criteria, or whether they are, for instance, triggered by fear or self-interest. In many cases, the observation of political behaviour may, in fact, not even permit an unambiguous distinction between legitimating and delegitimating behaviour. Even where it does, researchers will often not be able to discern the precise objects whose legitimacy is affirmed or challenged. Is protest, for instance, merely directed against individual decisions and authorities, or against the regime, some of its features and institutions, democracy ‘as is’, or even the idea of democracy? In the absence of a firm knowledge of the underlying motives, the interpretation of various types of behaviour as indicators of legitimacy often rests on implicit normative understandings of what constitutes appropriate levels and forms of participation in established democracies. These normative understandings may not even be uncontroversial in the field of democratic theory itself but, in any case, cannot replace the empirical study of legitimation patterns. Thus protest behaviour and instances of non-compliance may be issue-specific and entirely motivated by self-interest – the NIMBY phenomenon springs to mind here. By the same token, it appears unwarranted to consider overall levels of violence – including hooliganism or other forms of violence that are not (primarily) directed at the state and its representatives, or at least not motivated by an explicit and normatively grounded disagreement with their performance – as indicators of legitimacy deficits (but see Gilley 2006b: 508).





Yet even the observation of protest movements and activities that are presumably underpinned by genuine normative convictions may not yield adequate indicators. After all, the frequency of protest events ‘tends to be higher in more democratic countries’ (Gilley 2006b: 507), and this might well be taken as a sign of democratic health. Thus it would appear rather implausible to conclude on no other evidential basis than comparatively high levels of protest that democratic regimes are less legitimate than non-democratic ones. If we concede that some ‘forms of protest ... represent an enlargement of more familiar ideas of citizen participation [and] do not reflect a repudiation of conventional politics or the political order’ (Sniderman 1981: 11), but rather constitute key features of pluralist societies and democratic governance, we have to make sure that we do not mistake the civic engagement of ‘critical citizens’ – including non-conventional and protest activities – for genuine challenges to the legitimacy of democratic principles and institutions (Norris 1999b; Norris et al. 2006). Undoubtedly, then, ‘not all expressions of unfavorable orientations have the same degree of gravity for a political system. Some may be consistent with its maintenance’ (Easton 1975: 437). The availability of channels of protest – and of civil liberties writ large – might even strengthen the legitimacy of the democratic nation state, at least in the eyes of those protesters who may be qualified as dissatisfied democrats (Haunss 2007). In a similar vein, presumptive behavioural indicators of support may be ambiguous. Many of them rest on the view of ‘mass participation [as] lifeblood of representative democracy’ (Norris 2002: 5). Any sign of disengagement from the democratic process, most notably electoral abstention, then becomes a matter of concern. However, a quick glance at the normative and empirical literature on democracies suggests that no consensus regarding the desirability or meaning of high levels of (conventional) participation exists, and that too much participation is even frequently interpreted as a crisis signal in the ‘realist’ strand of the literature (Almond and Verba 1963; Dahl 1989; Schumpeter 1996; Schmidt 2008). Authors such as Sniderman (1981) or Hirschman (1982) also highlight the basic ambiguity of participation levels. And again, the assumption that participation is always related to genuine legitimacy beliefs – now of a supportive kind – is hardly warranted. One may, for instance, ask whether shrinking voter turnout levels always signalize an erosion of legitimacy (the usual alarmist interpretation), or whether they might as well indicate mere indifference and even high levels of satisfaction with a regime’s performance. Authors like Gilley (2006b: 508–9) suggest that the answer is clear: ‘Given the



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well-known problem of the inconsequentiality of a single vote, the act of voting ... can rarely be seen as reflecting the rational pursuit of selfinterest’, and hence it must, at least in part, be an expression of satisfaction. But even if this claim were uncontroversial – much of the rational choice literature has, in fact, not renounced the opposite view that voting may be explained in terms of individual utility maximization (see the literature cited in Green and Shapiro 1996: chapter 4), and a new line of research even claims to have evidence for genetic causes of differential participation rates (Fowler et al. 2008) – one could still plausibly hold that electoral abstention is, in many cases, motivated by self-interest rather than outright cynicism or alienation: a rational voter who is not overly dissatisfied with any of the candidates or parties running – or equally satisfied with all of them and perhaps, by implication, with the regime as a whole – might be expected to stay at home. Thus participation rates are no unequivocal indicator of legitimacy levels – or, for that matter, of the objects whose legitimacy is supposedly affirmed or questioned by way of (non-)voting. Participation rates tend to vary between countries with proportional and majoritarian electoral arrangements – should we, then, really conclude without further evidence that the electoral system or some other institution of, say, the United States is less legitimate than that of Germany (see also Anderson and Guillory 1997)? Moreover, a citizen may indeed decide to vote in order to affirm his or her normatively grounded support for a political system. Yet any number of legitimacy beliefs may be tied to this act: for instance, a belief in the democratic quality of a regime – the perception that it ensures popular sovereignty, or that it is accountable and responsive – but perhaps also a belief in the charismatic nature of its leadership, or in its effectiveness. Gilley’s contention that even a vote for anti-system parties indicates legitimacy because ‘the mere act of voting, of working from existing structures, constitutes evidence of consent to the political system’ (2006b: 509) is therefore even more counter-intuitive and still further removed from the necessary consideration of underlying motives. Needless to say, few would feel truly comfortable if one were to interpret the NSDAP’s rising vote shares (combined with high levels of participation) as indicators of growing legitimacy in the Weimar Republic’s final years, and Gilley himself ultimately (2006b: 509) concedes that anti-system party strength may equally be an indicator of legitimacy problems. It is, at the very least, difficult to understand why voting for anti-system parties should be interpreted as an act of consent, and a protest rally against, say, the use of nuclear energy – or, for that matter,




against right-wing extremist parties – as an act of dissent with democratic regimes. In short, upon further inspection, the observation of particular types of political behaviour, be they conventional or not, does not provide us with unequivocal indicators of support levels – which a focus both on protest and on affirmative behaviour might over- or underestimate – or of the precise objects of legitimation. What is more, the underlying motives of acts of support or dissent, and hence the foundations of legitimacy, can hardly be gleaned from the observation of behaviour alone. If anything, inferences on these foundations would appear more risky on the basis of the observational approach than on the basis of survey data. Turning to the aspect of legitimation, we may immediately notice that, while having a comparative advantage over public opinion research, the observational approach nevertheless tends to focus on a rather narrow set of actors. This is, of course, notably true for research on protest movements, which by definition concentrates on the ‘challenger’ side of political conflicts – rulers and political elites are only indirectly taken into account here as the alter of such movements, and, moreover, only a fraction of the citizenry of Western democracies – active protesters – is considered. Yet, while survey research, through representative samples, is able to make inferences to the entire population, this is hardly the case with protest research. If we aim to gauge the levels and foundations of legitimacy, we cannot ignore the fact that ‘support is a function not only of actions or intensities of feelings, pro or con, but of the number of members who hold these feelings’ (Easton 1965: 165). However, as with attitudes, what is required in the study of legitimation processes is more than ‘a simple summing procedure’ (165). We also need to make ‘inferences concerning the power of the members who are involved’ and the ‘potential or effectiveness of the support’ (166) in the observation of both protest and affirmative behaviour. As suggested above, a focus on protest events may, for instance, lead us to underestimate regime support if we mistake the protest of a minority group or a mere shift to nonconventional forms of participation as signs of a legitimacy crisis (Norris 2002: 5). But with an exclusive focus on protesters, or even citizens at large, we might equally fail to notice a particularly alarming erosion of support among a regime’s insiders (Koopmans and Statham 1999: 205). Again, then, it is not least the fact that political elites themselves are key participants in legitimation processes that tends to be neglected. The legitimacy claims or self-legitimating practices of these elites – the ‘inculcation of a sense of legitimacy’ (Easton 1965: 278; see also Edelman




1971) by way of patriotic rituals, ceremonies, and so on – have so far been largely neglected even though they arguably play a major role in the creation and preservation of regime support. Both perspectives, then, also seem ill-suited to capture the dynamics and mechanisms of (de)legitimation and the full range of actors and strategies involved in the (re)production, challenging, or transformation of regime support.6 Of course, we do not suggest that the attitudinal and behavioural dimensions of legitimacy should be neglected, or that public opinion and observational research are inappropriate ways of examining them. Each dimension is important in its own right, and the two approaches outlined above have their comparative advantages in studying them. Yet, following Easton himself, we may conclude our brief review with the observation that ‘[t]he relevant dimensions of support, even at our general theoretical level, must ... include much more than just scalable attitudes or countable overt actions’ (1965: 165). Legitimation discourses: Introducing the communicative dimension A final important weakness of the reviewed approaches – which in fact has a lot to do with the deficits indicated above – arises out of their neglect of the role played by language and communication in the reproduction or transformation of legitimacy. To be fair, there are some token references to language in the extant literature. According to Easton, for instance, ‘[w]e may support goals or ideals by literally fighting for them or by merely espousing them, an institution by verbally defending it ...’ (1965: 159). Gilley (2006b: 503) speaks of ‘responses to the moral reasons given by the state for the way it holds and exercises power’ and of ‘a shared morality that exists in the everyday discourse of citizens. Clearly, this is the core notion of legitimacy since it is here where the autonomous realm of ideas and arguments is seen most vividly’. Koopmans and Statham also underline that the specific content or framing of political claims-making is highly important, and that traditional forms of protest are, in fact, increasingly replaced by ‘public discourse as a medium of social conflict and symbolic struggles’ (1999: 205; see also Franzosi 2004; Haunss 2007). And yet such more or less oblique references to language appear to have had relatively few consequences. The bulk of the literature continues to examine legitimacy on the basis of attitudinal and behavioural indicators of the types described above, largely neglecting the role of communication. Where attitudes are gauged through surveys, there is, of course, some methodologically




driven attention to the wording of questionnaires, and hence to the researcher’s language use. But no genuine communicative interaction between interviewers and respondents takes place in the artificial survey encounter, and the language use of respondents is not considered further. Where political behaviour is observed, its non-verbal elements tend to be the focus of interest. While recent work in the area has certainly established a link between protest event and political discourse analysis, the use of newspaper content in political claims analysis largely remains as instrumental as in survey research: it is merely a convenient way of gathering quantitative information on the scope and nature of protest events from newspaper articles.7 In short, if empirical research on legitimacy is restricted to the two approaches presented, we are bound to lose the key distinction between attitudes that are expressed in the public sphere and those that are not, and between activities that constitute or involve discursive practices – as well as being acknowledged and discussed in broader political discourses – and other types of activities. This neglect of legitimacyrelated communication not only constitutes a neglect of a third, and, as we intend to show, particularly meaningful, type of ‘evidence of consent’ but, ultimately, also stands in the way of a deeper, more ‘realistic’ understanding of legitimation processes.8 A text analytical perspective focusing on the communicative dimension of legitimacy and legitimation may, of course, build on the linguistic turn in political science, and hence on the insight that reality, including legitimacy and other aspects of the political world, is socially constructed. This construction of reality, however, is essentially a discursive phenomenon in which language, thought, and action are inextricably linked (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Keller 2001, 2005; Luckmann 2001; Nullmeier 2001; Schwab-Trapp 2001). In line with Richard Merelman’s alternative programme for the study of political cultures and their ‘deep structures’, we therefore submit that the ‘collective (self-)representations’ that underpin the generation or transformation of legitimacy are not fully amenable to the kind of survey-based or observational research described above, and that the (de)legitimation of regimes and institutions occurs against the backdrop of political cultures as ‘system[s] of communication’ (1989: 471). Hence legitimacy research cannot limit its purview ‘to the effects of communication on audience perception’ or non-verbal behaviour (482). As Merelman himself points out, empir ical work along the lines he suggests has gained a certain prominence in the anthropological study of traditional societies. Yet, if anything, the essentially ‘discursive character of representative,




parliamentary democracy’ (Steffek 2003: 256) and other forms of modern democratic government would appear to make a focus on communicative action and discourses even more imperative in the context of legitimacy research. We may in fact leave it open here whether ‘[n]either traditional nor charismatic legitimation requires extensive communicative justification’ (Steffek 2003: 262). But, for representative democracies, the existence of a genuine public sphere – defined as a society-wide forum that provides (relatively) open access to information, enables the (relatively) free exchange of competing opinions, and establishes a communicative link between rulers and citizens – is undoubtedly a key prerequisite both in a normative and in an empirical sense (Kaase 1998; Sarcinelli 1998b, 2002: 12–13; Schmidt 2002: 239; Peters 2007; Habermas 2008; Wessler et al. 2008: chapter 1). Without the opportunity for citizens to publicly formulate demands and communicate them to their representatives, to gather the information required to scrutinize their work, and to deliberate about the outputs and impact of political decisions, democratic government would be little more than an illusion. The very public nature of decision-making is, in other words, inextricably linked with key aspects and criteria of democratic quality – and legitimacy – such as transparency, responsiveness, and accountability (Sarcinelli 2002: 11). Moreover, besides the need to justify individual political decisions, rulers have not least to justify their own authority – as well as the basic principles of the regimes and institutions they represent – and, in so doing, they have to provide citizens with normatively acceptable reasons for the compliance that is expected of them. Thus the legitimacy of the democratic nation state ‘can only be generated through a public discourse’ in which rulers present self-legitimating claims that a majority of citizens affirm by contributing their own – largely positive – evaluations of a given regime and its institutions; conversely, ‘any challenge to already existing legitimacy must enter the public discourse first’, and hence ‘discourse is the right proxy to study processes of legitimation and de-legitimation’ (Steffek 2003: 265, 2004: 486). These legitimation discourses – together with the individual claims and evaluations that are put forward and defended, scrutinized and approved or contested in national public spheres, and supported by various kinds of arguments or justifications – are the subject of this book.9 Like other kinds of public discourse, legitimation discourses may be conceptualized as bodies of knowledge or repositories of ‘collective representations’ (Merelman 1989), frames (Dahinten 2006), and interpretations pertinent to a specific issue – in our case normative knowledge





related to the legitimacy of political systems. Moreover, such discourses are ‘systems of rules which make it possible for certain statements but not others to occur at particular times, places and institutional locations’ (Fairclough 1992: 40), and for certain types of speakers – discursive elites – to have more ‘voice’ than others. As a consequence, some kinds of propositions will be more frequent, comprehensible and acceptable than others; some discourse coalitions and their legitimacy evaluations will be dominant and others marginal. The existence of hegemonic propositions in legitimation discourses, and their reproduction through them, adds an element of power. Hence stable (democratic) legitimacy should be reflected in, and underpinned by, legitimation discourses in which political elites and other supporters of the status quo – legitimizers – as well as the normative benchmarks advocated by them are dominant; conversely, where attacks on the status quo – put forward by delegitimizers – gain the upper hand, a legitimacy crisis might ensue.10 How, then, do legitimation discourses relate to the attitudinal and behavioural dimensions of legitimacy? Figure 2.1 suggests linkages between these dimensions, as well as illustrating the relationship between the political system and the wider public on whose support the legitimacy of rulers depends. First of all, the figure underlines the fact that legitimacy beliefs and the specific ‘reasons people have to support governance are not developed in solitude, but emerge through a process of intersubjective communication, that is, through discourse’ (Steffek 2004: 486). Hence the (trans)formation of legitimacy-related political attitudes, and similarly the translation of behavioural dispositions into acts of support or dissent, occur against the backdrop of, and usually within the parameters set by, such legitimation discourses. Many acts of support or dissent, as well as the self-legitimating practices and rituals of political elites, are, moreover, linked with – or represent – discursive practices to begin with (Rucht 1994a). One may even go a step further and suggest, with Steffek, that ‘[i]n the absence of public debate about an institution of governance, citizens cannot form any beliefs pertaining to that institution’ (2004: 489) – the institution thus remains ‘a-legitimate’ (Steffek 2007: 190). In a similar vein, acts of support or dissent will be more or less effective depending on the extent to which they are reflected in, and compatible with, legitimation discourses. As suggested above, these discourses are relatively inert and – because of the prominent role of political elites and their self-legitimating claims in them – likely to have a built-in bias in favour of the status quo. Thus they are likely to strengthen the legitimacy of regimes and their core institutions. However, the structures and rules of these



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Attitudes expressed in legitimation statements

Individual attitudes Survey research

Behavioural dispositions

Public communication Text analysis

Political system/elites

Events shaping attitudes

Discursive/ non-discursive behaviour

Political behaviour Observation

Figure 2.1

Dimensions of and participants in legitimation processes

discourses have to be reproduced, and there is a dialectical relationship between individual discursive practices on the one hand, and discourses as a whole on the other: each individual contribution is made in the context of an existing discourse, yet the latter’s reproduction also depends on discourse participants who respect and thereby perpetuate its rules. And while ‘choice – even the choice to resist ... – always takes place against the central normative tendencies’ (Merelman 1989: 480) of political cultures and the discourses underpinning them, the delegitimizers of a given regime or one of its institutions may, of course, be successful in ‘challeng[ing] dominant definitions of political reality by mobilizing new interpretations – schemata and frames – of contested social relationships, and making them visible in the public sphere’ (Koopmans and Statham 1999: 204). Hence the legitimacy of political systems is not least a function of each side’s effort, skills, and ultimate success in the ongoing (de)legitimation game (Mulligan 2007) of such discourses. In summary, we do not suggest the causal primacy of this additional, communicative dimension of legitimacy, or that a text analytical



Discourses influencing legitimacy beliefs


perspective on this dimension is without biases and shortcomings of its own. However, a focus on legitimation discourses shares the naturaldata advantage with the observational approach. Moreover, by focusing on language, communication, and legitimacy-related speech acts (Austin 1962; Searle 1969; Nullmeier 2003), we should be able to get closer to the actual foundations of legitimacy beliefs and assessments held or made in Western democracies – and to their reproduction – than with the help of the other two approaches. With Barker (2001: 34), therefore, we advocate a shift of attention from the ‘battery questionnaires’ of public opinion research to ‘[f]ree-range public claims’. Moreover, unlike extant work in the mould of the observational approach, our perspective is serious about an ‘interactive’ understanding of (de)legitimation (Peters 2005: 97), and hence concerned with legitimacy claims and assessments at both the (political) elite and mass levels; our own empirical study of the quality press will, in fact, focus on the widely neglected elite level.

Examining legitimation discourses: An analytical framework The positive or negative assessments put forward in legitimacy-related communication, then, represent a third major kind of ‘evidence of consent’ that may be used to supplement more conventional attitudinal and behavioural indicators; such legitimation statements matter because of their important role in the (re)production or transformation of legitimacy and its foundations. Their study helps us understand the ‘way people arrive at (or the basis upon which they hold) attitudes’ and the ‘reasons they give in their defence’ (Offe 2006: 27), and hence the justifications behind their acts of support or dissent; and, last but not least, a focus on legitimation discourses does justice to the interactive and essentially communicative nature of (de)legitimation processes. Before we can proceed to the analysis of legitimacy-related communication, a few more words on key concepts – and especially the notion of legitimation discourses and statements itself – are in order. In this section, we first clarify our understanding of public spheres and discursive arenas, highlighting the important role of the mass media in the construction of political reality in general and legitimacy in particular. In a second step, we operationalize our definition of legitimation discourses and propose an analytical framework that may be used to examine the structures and trajectories of national legitimation discourses in the quality press – the focus of our own study – or other discursive arenas of Western democracies.



36


As indicated above, our starting point is the concept of public spheres. Yet which of the many and diverse channels and forms of discursive exchange that exist in pluralist societies do we refer to when we talk about public spheres? A broad understanding of the public might include legitimacy-related communication in the primary social networks and interactions of citizens – for instance, conversations at their workplaces or around dinner tables. There can hardly be any doubt that the topic of legitimacy is regularly addressed in such conversations, and that these influence the (trans)formation of related beliefs or behavioural dispositions. On the other hand, rulers – including the political elites of Western democracies – have their arcana (Steffek 2003: 264). Rodney Barker (2001), in fact, suggests the existence of legitimation practices and rituals that are not even meant to be observed or assessed by the wider public. However, there are both methodological and theoretical justifications for a narrower understanding of public spheres as essentially society-wide, more or less openly accessible forums of discursive exchange. While research on the genuine arcana of political institutions and their representatives is per definitionem impossible, research on private conversations would entail rather obvious methodological challenges as well. The observation and recording of such conversations would constitute a marked intrusion into the field, and hence might greatly dilute the natural-data advantage of text analytical methods that was highlighted above. In any case, the political elites of democracies are normatively and empirically required to communicate and publicly defend the legitimacy of the political systems they represent on the basis of the most convincing justifications and arguments they can muster, and the nature of claims that are made for public consumption appears more pertinent to an understanding of regime support and its discursive construction than the largely intractable question of what the ‘true’ elite beliefs might turn out to be if we had the chance to eavesdrop on conversations behind closed doors. In a similar vein, studying the private conversations of ‘average people’ might offer less value added than first meets the eye if citizens to a large extent take their cues from societywide debates and their most prominent elite voices when they develop and express their own political attitudes, as indeed suggested by John R. Zaller (1992) and others. Another aspect of our understanding of public spheres – their conceptualization as essentially national ones in which ‘members of the audience



Public spheres, discursive arenas, and the role of the mass media


are implicitly or explicitly addressed in their role as citizens’ (Wessler et al. 2008: 6) – appears even less problematic. To be sure, the extent to which globalization or European integration has fostered the transnationalization of public spheres in recent years and decades is the subject of a burgeoning literature (Klein et al. 2003; Wessler et al. 2008). Yet much of this research has confirmed the robustness of Karl W. Deutsch’s (1953) classical observation that national political communities are characterized by higher levels of discursive exchange than transnational ones. And, in any case, we may plausibly assume for the purposes of our own study that the spatial extension of discourses on the legitimacy of national political systems and their core institutions largely remains circumscribed by the geographical boundaries of those systems.11 Finally, in line with much extant work, we may conceptualize public spheres as a set of more or less overlapping, specialized discursive arenas, each of them characterized by a particular ‘cast’ (speakers), a ‘gallery’ (audience), and a ‘backstage’ (its production structures and the shared historical experiences, cultural values, or knowledge that speakers and audiences draw on: see Neidhardt 1994; Rucht 1994b; Ferree, Gamson and Gerhards 2002). The scope and nature of legitimation discourses are likely to differ between such arenas, and each might have a nationally specific weight and impact on the (re)production or transformation of legitimacy. However, the following three arenas should usually be prominent. The first is the academic sphere; political science and legal scholarship on the democratic nation state and its legitimacy not only provide the backdrop of this study but also represent a major potential source of legitimacy-related normative criteria and assessments for the wider public and discursive or political elites, even if it would be inappropriate to assume a diffusion model according to which the normative foundations of regime support trickle down from, or are fully congruent with, any ‘canon’ of external standards propagated by the academic literature.12 The second important arena, whose double role in legitimation discourses has also been pointed out already, is the political system itself – broadly defined, and hence including representatives of the administration and the judiciary. On the one hand, the political system comprises the very institutions and elites whose acceptability is evaluated in legitimation discourses. On the other hand, as indicated above, the self-representations and legitimacy claims advanced by these elites – whether in party and campaign manifestos, in parliamentary debates and government declarations, in press conferences and administrative proclamations, or in legal opinions and court rulings – may



38

safely be expected to be prominent in legitimacy-related communication, even if they are not necessarily shared by other discourse participants. Given that authorities have a vested interest in the generation and maintenance of legitimacy, they also have a strong incentive to enter or influence debates between the legitimizers and delegitimizers of regimes and their institutions by contributing self-legitimating propositions – ‘rightfulness “as claimed” by rulers’ (Gilley 2006b: 502) – and evaluation standards that are likely to put these institutions in a favourable light; moreover, governments and political elites writ large have privileged channels of access to the wider public. Both methodological and theoretical considerations, however, suggest a focus on the mass-media arena (Sarcinelli 1998a, 2002; Jarren et al. 2002; Peters 2005, 2007). In modern societies like the ones examined in this book, the society-wide discursive exchange that we associate with the notion of public spheres is largely organized – and public spheres are therefore essentially constituted – by the media and journalists. The media link citizens with rulers and the various discursive arenas with each other, and hence the contours of broader public discourses are most easily grasped by examining media communication (Habermas 2008; Wessler et al. 2008: chapter 1). The rationale for an examination of legitimacy-related media communication is, however, not so much that it provides access to citizen beliefs – that is, public opinion as measured by surveys – or to the discourses of other, more specialized arenas. We argue, rather, that the media and individual journalists should receive the attention of legitimacy researchers in their capacity as gatekeepers, agenda-setters, and discursive entrepreneurs. The voices and claims that might be prominent in more limited spheres of communication must be successfully fed into – or taken up by – the media to reach and influence the wider public. Some arenas, issues, or positions are therefore undoubtedly better represented by media discourses than others – ‘simple’ citizens, for instance, are considerably more likely to partake in them as a mere audience than as speakers. And journalists do not just ‘organize the exchange between speakers’ from different arenas, selecting pieces of information or claims that appear more or less ‘fit to print’ or broadcast on the basis of news value and other media-specific criteria. Instead, they also ‘inject their own opinions and interpretations, thereby partly acting as speakers themselves’ (Wessler et al. 2008: 4) and framing issues in ways that are very likely to impact on their perception and discussion by the wider public. Our argument, then, is that media discourses – and especially those related to political issues and legitimacy – have a relevance in their own




right. The exact relationship between public opinion in the conventional sense and media discourses cannot be probed here, and we suggest that individual attitudes and value orientations may be variously strengthened, weakened, or modified by the exposure of citizens to the media. But if elite cues transported by the media indeed play an important role in shaping beliefs (Zaller 1992; Wessler et al. 2008: chapter 1) and political cultures as a whole are grounded in ‘a system of ideas, then the institutions which specialize in the transmission of this system – institutions such as ... the mass media – are crucially important’ (Merelman 1989: 476), not least for empirical legitimacy researchers. Moreover, the analysis of legitimation discourses in the media enables us to get a hold on the claims and evaluations of those speakers who are influential enough to cross their entry threshold, and hence of the discursive or political elites with the greatest stake in the (re)production or transformation of legitimacy and its foundations. Finally, as ‘society’s watchdog[s]’ (Gutteling et al. 2002: 95), journalists are themselves prominent voices in legitimacy-related communication; political elites are as likely to take their cues on the beliefs of ‘average people’ from the media as from surveys, or from personal encounters and conversations. In short, for political elites and ‘simple’ citizens alike, the media are both major outlets and the most important repositories of frames, interpretations, and normative criteria for affirmative or critical evaluations of political systems and their core institutions. Without denying that ‘average people’ may occasionally become active participants in legitimation discourses as well, we therefore submit that the claims that dominate media discourses – including the acts of support or dissent reported in the media – deserve particular attention in the study of legitimation processes. The media arena can and should, of course, be further subdivided. Both electronic and print media arguably contribute to legitimation discourses, and there is no doubt that television coverage of political and legitimacy-related issues has become ever more important (Marcinkowski 1998; Tenscher 1998). Moreover, various segments of the print media – the daily press and news magazines, quality and tabloid papers, and so on – may be distinguished, again, with each of them making a specific contribution to these discourses. Yet national public spheres tend to be dominated by a small number of opinion leaders that ‘constantly observe each other ... and are, in turn, observed by other, less dominant news media (for example regional or special interest media) that pick up cues from them’ (Wessler et al. 2008: 4). Besides the news and discussion programmes of major television channels, quality




national newspapers and magazines with an elite readership have largely managed to maintain this influential role in most public spheres, the undeniable importance of television and the yellow press notwithstanding. Thus it is not only the rather prohibitive costs and methodological challenges of research on electronic media footage – or the fact that newspapers are ‘relatively convenient and accessible sources of data collection and analysis’ (Gaskell and Bauer 2001: 7) – that suggest a focus on the quality press in the examination of legitimation discourses. In fact, legitimacy-related communication in opinion-leading newspapers may arguably be ‘taken as a good proxy for the tone of the wider media arena in the country’ precisely because of the elite status and functions of such papers and their readership: ‘It is the press that is read by decision takers and by journalists in other media outlets’ (Gaskell and Bauer 2001: 7; see also Wilke 1998; Habermas 2008). In short, research into the discursive (re)production and transformation of legitimacy is well advised to pay attention to these influential voices, even though, again, an exact match between legitimacy-related content in national and regional – or quality and tabloid – newspapers is not to be expected. But discourses in the quality press are likely to represent a stabilizing force for the legitimacy of political systems, and, conversely, any signs of an erosion or transformation of legitimacy and its foundations in the mainstream of public debates, as reflected by that segment of the media arena, should have considerable weight as indicators of a legitimacy crisis.13 The grammar of legitimation In the previous section we established that public spheres and legitimation discourses are ‘segmented’ along national boundary lines as well as internally differentiated (Wessler et al. 2008). Text analytical research on the legitimation of political systems might want to focus on specific discursive arenas such as the media but will ultimately have to explore the relationship between them, as well as their specific functions for the (re)production and transformation of legitimacy. Yet our notion of legitimation discourses still has to be demarcated from political communication writ large. To be sure, legitimation discourses may be – and, in fact, are likely to be – embedded in broader debates and conflicts related to policy issues, authorities, and (electoral) politics. Thus it will not suffice to merely suggest that these discourses – and related texts or propositions – are ‘about’ one and the same topic (Gaskell and Bauer 2001: 5; Jung 2001: 32) – in our case the (il)legitimacy (acceptability, justifiability) of political systems or communities





as a whole and their major institutions. Instead, we have to develop a precise, viable operationalization of genuinely legitimacy-related communication. Moreover, the basic elements and key features of legitimation discourses have to be identified before we can set out to examine discursive structures and trajectories. Fortunately, such an operationalization may be gleaned fairly directly from our definition of legitimacy. The narrowing down of political communication to legitimation discourses, then, involves a twofold procedure. First of all, with a view to legitimation objects, communication pertaining to individual policy or legal decisions, the authorities of the day, and so on may be excluded. Second, also in line with our definition of legitimacy, discursive acts of (de)legitimation may be conceptualized as positive or negative evaluations of political systems or one of their institutions in the light of generalizable normative criteria, or legitimation patterns. Of course, a whole range of cognitive and normative beliefs (expressed in the form of factual statements, political demands, and so on) may be – and, again, are very likely to be – tied to such assessments, but these constitute no more than the backdrop, as it were, of legitimation discourses in our narrow sense. Thus communicative acts or discursive practices of a very specific kind – legitimation statements – are the core elements of these discourses. Such propositions may, in turn, be identified and described with the help of a stylized legitimation grammar, somewhat along the lines of the ‘story grammars’ employed in protest event and political claims analysis (Koopmans and Statham 1999; Franzosi 2004). The most elementary way for a speaker to participate in legitimation discourses is to assess a political system or one of its core institutions as legitimate (acceptable, worthy of support ... ) or not, and to give a reason (argument) justifying his or her evaluation. The gist of a legitimation statement may thus be captured in three variables: the object to which it refers, whether the evaluation is affirmative or critical, and the pattern of legitimation used (Table 2.2).14 These statements, then, represent the communicative ‘evidence of consent’ that we shall use for the construction of our own, discursive indicators for the scope and nature of ‘overt’ support or dissent. In line with Merelman’s structuralist perspective, each variable of the grammar may conveniently be operationalized in terms of binary oppositions or categorical distinctions: evaluation of different types of legitimation objects as legitimate v. illegitimate, on the basis of democratic v. nondemocratic or input-oriented v. output-based patterns, and so on. The identification of legitimacy-related communication in a given discursive



42

The Communicative Dimension of Legitimacy 43 Table 2.2 The grammar of legitimation Original text: Direct democracy is a core element of our political system’s identity (NZZ, 15 January 2004).

Legitimation object

→

Direct democracy

Evaluation

→

Legitimation pattern

… is legitimate

… because it makes

a contribution to national identity.

Original text: Model Germany [according to an article by Otto Singer in the journal Kommune] is apparently no longer able to sufficiently adapt to new challenges, especially since reunification. Overall, the creeping corporatism of the welfare state shackles many productive and innovative forces (FAZ, 1 June 2004). Legitimation statement: Legitimation object

→

The German welfare state

Evaluation

→

… is illegitimate … because it is

Legitimation pattern inflexible; inefficient/ineffective.

Original text: The Liberal Democrat leader [Paddy Ashdown] told a rally in Eastbourne that the system was now so … inefficient and secretive that it no longer served the citizen. He said: ‘Next Tuesday you could elect … 650 saints; but it wouldn’t make any difference if our system of government no longer works’ (Times, 3 April 1992). Legitimation statement: Legitimation object

→

The British political system

Evaluation

→


… is illegitimate…

… because it is

inefficient/ineffective; not transparent.

Original text: We Americans [according to Herman Melville] are the peculiar, chosen people, the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of liberties of the world (Washington Post, 9 may 2004). Legitimation statement: Legitimation object The US political community

→

Evaluation

→


… is legitimate

… because

it is grounded in divine authority; respects human and civil rights.



Legitimation statement:


arena and time period, the measurement of its volume, and the subsequent examination of legitimation statements in light of the three core variables of our legitimation grammar enable us to map the ‘deep structures’ of this type of communication, and to make inferences on shortterm fluctuations as well as long-term (‘paradigmatic’) change.15 This analytical framework notably enables us to relate the structures and trajectories of national legitimation discourses to one of our three crisis scenarios, or to diagnose stable democratic legitimacy, and hence to probe the following set of questions: ●

●

●

●

How salient are legitimacy-related issues and problems in media discourses, and in the context of various types of policy debates (legitimation intensity and legitimacy attention cycles)? Do political systems overall tend to be considered legitimate or illegitimate, which of their core institutions are at the centre of media discourses, and how much discursive support do they enjoy (legitimation objects and legitimacy levels)? Which normative criteria underpin legitimacy assessments in media discourses, and which are privileged in affirmative or critical evaluations of various institutions (legitimation patterns and styles)? Which discursive mechanisms can be observed in legitimacy-related communication (strategies of delegitimation and relegitimation)?

Comparing legitimation discourses in the quality press of four Western democracies: Research design, methodological orientation, hypotheses The empirical study in Chapters 3 to 5 draws on the analytical framework outlined above to identify and compare the structures and trajectories of legitimation discourses in the quality press of Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the United States. Quite a few of the crisis diagnoses reviewed in Chapter 1 make rather sweeping inferences on the scope and nature of regime support in Western democracies on the basis of individual cases – including Germany and the United States (see the literature cited in Kateb 1979; Kaase 1980; Birch 1984) – or, worse, no empirical evidence whatsoever. By contrast, our sample of four countries – two Anglo-Saxon and two continental European democracies – moves beyond the case study design (Gerring 2007), thus allowing for a set of ‘middle-range’ generalizations on the structures and trajectories of legitimation discourses in the age of globalization while remaining



44

small enough to permit the study of idiosyncratic and context-specific features of discourses and their political environment that might fall by the wayside in a large-N design (Mair 1998; Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003; Brady and Collier 2004; Lichbach and Zuckerman 2009). In the following, we review the factors that were taken into account in the selection of cases for our country, newspaper, and issue-area samples. A number of hypotheses concerning the differential impact of these factors on the structures and trajectories of the examined national legitimation discourses – on (shifts in) legitimacy levels and foundations, privileged legitimation objects and styles, or (de)legitimating strategies – are also suggested. These hypotheses will be further developed and examined in Chapters 3 to 5. The remainder of the present chapter discusses methodological issues related to our text selection, coding, and data analysis. Country sample If globalization and its effects on the nation state were indeed key explanatory factors for rising challenges to the legitimacy of Western democracies, as alleged by much recent literature, the varying exposure of countries to globalization and – even more importantly – their degree of political internationalization should have a clear impact on the scope and nature of legitimation discourses, and notably on legitimacy levels. There is considerable variation in terms of economic and communicative openness in our sample. If only by virtue of their size, the economy and public sphere of the United States appear more closed than those of Germany, Britain, and especially Switzerland. But the competing ‘efficiency’ and ‘compensation’ hypotheses advanced by the political-economy literature (Katzenstein 1985; Garrett 1998) illustrate that there is not even agreement on the impact of economic openness and globalization on forms and levels of state intervention or capacity. It appears even more difficult, and perhaps implausible, to hypothesize a clear and direct impact of globalization on legitimation discourses. In countries such as Switzerland with a long, positive track record in dealing with the challenges of economic openness and vulnerability, globalization might not represent the same challenge to the legitimacy of the nation or welfare state as in political systems where the degree of openness – or public awareness of its potentially negative effects – has grown more recently and been experienced as a new threat, as in the United States (where international trade and its presumptive effects on national wealth and jobs are undoubtedly as much of a hot-button issue as in smaller countries, despite the relative closedness of the American





economy). In short, the ‘objective’ degree of exposure to globalization is unlikely to be unequivocally linked with a greater or lesser erosion of legitimacy. The political internationalization of our four democracies, then, appears more germane in the context of a study on legitimation discourses. The cases in our sample differ greatly in terms of their (non-) membership and more or less prominent role in international organizations and regimes, and also in terms of their public’s and political elites’ more or less pronounced scepticism vis-à-vis such multilateral arrangements. Besides two European Union members, Germany and Britain, the sample contains Switzerland, which continues to shun the EU and remains highly sceptical about membership of international organizations, as well as the United States, whose superpower role and traditional hostility towards joining multilateral arrangements or ceding sovereignty to them make it our case with the arguably lowest degree of (de facto) political internationalization. To the extent that the loss of sovereignty to internationalized governance arrangements and the related loss of parliamentary control over government decision-making at the international level foster legit imacy problems for national political systems with their core representative institutions and democratic principles, we should, therefore, expect greater challenges in Germany and Britain than in Switzerland and the United States. After all, the people retain more power, via referendums and the US Congress, to fend off shifts of political authority negotiated by governments than the German and British parliaments. However, the ‘objective’ degree of internationalization might once again be less important than related attitudes and perceptions. Thus the shift of political authority to Brussels should be less of a problem in Germany – a founding member of the EU whose public remains comparatively integration-friendly – than in Britain, a latecomer with pronounced EU scepticism at the mass and elite levels. In short, the effects of political internationalization on the legitimacy of Western democracies might also be contingent upon the existence and nature of legitimation discourses focusing on the emerging global and internationalized governance arrangements themselves. Where EU or UN opponents have a lot of ‘voice’, the hollowing out of the nation state might, for instance, have a different impact on evaluations of national political systems and institutions than in their absence.16 The first mediating influence that we therefore have to take into account in a study of public discourses relates to national differences in media systems and journalistic styles, which might create more or



46

less favourable opportunity structures for globalization-induced challenges to the legitimacy of Western democracies. According to Hallin and Mancini (2004), the two continental European democracies in the sample have corporatist media systems, characterized by a relatively strong partisan orientation and rather close links with the state and its elites, while the two Anglo-Saxon democracies have liberal systems in which the media are more independent, and hence might be expected to be more prone to engage in – or give room to – delegitimating communication. As Table 2.3 indicates, our considerations regarding the degree of political internationalization and the type of media system would, then, lead us to expect the greatest challenges to the legitimacy of the national political system in Britain, and the least pronounced challenges in Switzerland; legitimacy levels in Germany and the United States should fall between these extreme poles. Yet differences in media systems hardly exhaust the list of potentially relevant factors. The four countries in our sample differ not least in terms of their nationally specific institutional arrangements and forms of democratic government, as indicated by Table 2.4. First of all, Switzerland – where direct-democratic elements are obviously very important – stands in contrast with the three other representative democracies, where these elements are absent or marginal at the national level. Second, there is considerable variation in terms of the number of veto players in our sample, and hence in terms of the concentration or dispersal of power. The main contrast is between Britain – the only case of the single-actor type, whose departures from the Westminster model are few, minor, and mostly recent – and the other three, which can more aptly be described as multi-actor systems or consensus democracies (Lijphart 1999; Schmidt 2002; Tsebelis 2002; Abromeit and Stoiber 2006).

Table 2.3 Political internationalization, media systems, and legitimation discourses Degree of political internationalization Media system

High

Low

Liberal

Britain (low legitimacy levels) Germany (medium legitimacy levels)

United States (medium legitimacy levels) Switzerland (high legitimacy levels)

Corporatist





Table 2.4

Overview, institutional arrangements

Degree of complexity, number of veto players

Germany

Switzerland

Britain

United States

High

High

Low

High

Form of government

Parliamentary, ‘Hybrid’,strong strong bicameralism, bicameralism, coalition coalition governments governments

Party system Electoral system Territorial organization Role of constitution and judiciary

Multi-party PR

Multi-party PR

Parliamentary, Presidential, strong weak bicameralism, bicameralism, single-party single-party governments majority governments Two-party Two-party SMP SMP

Federal

Federal

Unitary

Federal

Strong

Weak

Strong

Role of organized interests

Strong, corporatism

Rigid constitution, weak judicial review Strong, corporatism

Weak, pluralism

Weak, pluralism

Note: PR = proportional representation; SMP = single-member plurality. Source: Adapted from Lijphart 1999.

But what might the relationship be between these institutional features and the four national legitimation discourses? It has, of course, become a commonplace in political science to suggest that institutions matter, and, a number of sometimes heated internal controversies notwithstanding, empirical work in the mould of the new institutionalism has indeed produced ample evidence for the claim that institutional arrangements shape the opportunity structures of political actors, their behaviour, and even the formation of their underlying preferences and beliefs to a significant degree (Steinmo et al. 1992; Hall and Taylor 1996; Rothstein 1998). That institutional designs might affect the construction of meaning – and are linked with public discourses – is an idea already foreshadowed by March and Olsen’s (1989) seminal contribution and developed more systematically – for policy discourses – by Vivien A. Schmidt (2003) and others in a discursive version of the new institutionalism. Schmidt, for instance, builds upon the distinction between single-actor and multi-actor systems, linking them with two



48

basic types of discourses – communicative and coordinative – and even with two presumably dominant evaluation standards for the respective policy outputs of these different institutional arrangements, namely, efficiency and inclusiveness. Thus it appears plausible to hypothesize a close relationship between the structures of national legitimation discourses and institutional arrangements, too. As suggested above, political systems rely on discursive practices of an affirmative kind for the reproduction of their legitimacy. The political elites who have the greatest stake in legitimation processes are at the same time, and for this very reason, likely to be among the most prominent voices in legitimacy-related communication. Both positive and negative legitimation statements might, however, be expected to focus on a regime’s core institutions rather than marginal ones as legitimation objects, and on the appropriateness of normative criteria usually associated with – or propagated by – these institutions as legitimation patterns. For instance, standards of legality might play a greater role in political systems with a strong, popular judiciary than in systems where democratic institutions and procedures are more prominent. If so, the outlined institutional differences between our four democracies should indeed have a discernible impact on the structures of their legitimation discourses (see also Beetham 1991: 15; Steffek 2003: 260; Abromeit and Stoiber 2007). Most importantly, perhaps, the singleactor or multi-actor nature of political systems could be hypothesized to impact the kind and number of objects on which legitimation discourses concentrate. Thus, in a Westminster system like Britain, broad support for its core institution – the House of Commons – or the principles of representative government might suffice to ensure the legitimacy of the regime as a whole; conversely, a legitimacy crisis of Britain’s sole or few core institution(s) could threaten the legitimacy of the entire system. By contrast, the legitimizers and delegitimizers of multi-actor systems have more choice, as it were, in the selection of institutions to be assessed positively or negatively; no single institution suggests itself as pars pro toto of the regime in an obvious fashion. And, while support for an individual regime element alone is unlikely to ensure overall legitimacy, the crisis of a single institution – even an important one – should not be as consequential in the three multi-actor systems as in Britain. Instead, more than one institution has to carry the burden of legitimation, and, conversely, it should take sustained attacks on more than one core institution to jeopardize overall legitimacy. Moreover, given




the link between political institutions and related normative standards, we may hypothesize a similar concentration or dispersal on the part of legitimation patterns, with consequences for the kind of legitimating or delegimating strategies that prove more or less viable in each national setting. We can also speculate on the impact of specific regime elements or institutions, although it is certainly not always possible to formulate clear expectations in that regard. As suggested above, the existence of direct-democratic procedures in Switzerland might, for instance, be an important ‘antidote’ to legitimacy problems associated with political internationalization and deparliamentarization; a correlation with a prominent role of democratic evaluation standards for the political system as a whole might also be expected. The citizens of Britain, Germany, and the United States cannot as easily ‘pull the emergency brake’ when their governments negotiate an unpopular shift of political authority to the international level (as with Swiss plans for EU membership). Likewise, perceptions and assessments of internationalization and deparliamentarization might, in part, be a function of parliamentary as opposed to presidential regime characteristics. After all, the American Congress remains more powerful in the face of internationalization than its counterparts in Britain and Germany, the two parliamentary systems in our sample – the Senate can, and regularly does, bring down international treaties negotiated by the President. The effect of federalism is perhaps less clear. The notion of dividing sovereignty between the nation state and international organizations may be less ‘provocative’ where such a division already exists at the national level. On the other hand, any shift of political authority to the international level is bound to affect the federal division of power and responsibilities, and is hence likely to be particularly controversial in federal systems, as exemplified by German debates on the role of the Länder (federal states) in the EU context. Finally, institutional arrangements in the four democracies are obviously embedded in specific historical experiences and political cultures, which may again result in certain objects and patterns of legitimation being more or less frequent and acceptable. For instance, some countries in the sample (Germany) have a stronger bureaucratic tradition than others (the United States), or a more legalistic political culture (Germany, the United States), which makes the prominence of certain legitimation objects (the state administration, courts) and patterns (effectiveness, legality) more likely than elsewhere. Similarly, three countries in our




sample – Switzerland, Britain, and the United States – have a long tradition of constitutional and democratic government, uninterrupted by authoritarian (let alone totalitarian) rule or experiences of foreign occupation. This stands in obvious contrast to the historical record of Germany, where, for this very reason, institutional features like a centralized government and evaluation standards like charismatic leadership should be in particularly strong disrepute; others might be highly valued precisely because they are associated with the successful redemocratization of (West) Germany in the post-war era, the institutional peculiarities of the Federal Republic (as opposed to the failed arrangements of Weimar – for instance, parliamentary v. (semi)presidential government), or features (partly) modelled after institutions in the (Western) allies’ democratic regimes (a powerful judiciary, strong bicameralism, and the like). Text corpora Besides the selection of countries, a number of further sampling decisions had to be made for our empirical study. As it is no more possible to examine discourses as a whole than to question entire populations in survey research, the discourses of interest are usually operationalized as text corpora of a manageable size, and inferences are made on the basis of these corpora (Jung 2001: 30–5). The selection of texts or text types ‘representing’ discourses in one or another arena, as well as the positions of their most important speakers, entails sampling decisions. Both random and ‘theoretical’ forms of sampling – or combinations of the two – may be appropriate. We opted for a series of theoretically motivated steps. First of all, and for the reasons given above, we decided to focus exclusively on the mass media – more precisely, the quality press – although a couple of very limited forays into other discursive arenas such as the political and academic spheres will be made here and there to corroborate, differentiate, or qualify our analysis of media content. Two of each country’s most important dailies – representing major voices of the (centre-)left and right, and hence broadly covering the political mainstream – were examined: Tagesanzeiger and Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland), Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany), Guardian and Times (Britain), New York Times and Washington Post (United States).17 Following a partly automated search routine briefly described in the Appendix, and in even greater detail on our webpage, we searched for pertinent articles – those containing




Overview, monitoring and case study corpora

Institutional reforms

Germany (articles; statements)

Switzerland (articles; statements)

United Kingdom (articles; statements)

United States (articles; statements)

(1) Constitutional reform; Bundestag adopts report of the Reform Commission; 9 June–8 September 1994 (22; 26).

(1) Reform of direct democracy; beginning of consultation process; 1 June– 31 August 1995 (16; 38).

(1) Constitutional reform; 1992 election; 9 February– 8 May 1992 (58; 78).

(1) Electoral reform; 1992 election; 3 September– 2 December 1992 (15; 28).

(1) European integration; referendum on EEA; 6 November 1992–5 January 1993 (72; 143).

(1) European integration; signing of Maastricht treaty; 10 October 1991–9 January 1992 (40; 71).

(1) First Iraq war; passing of war resolutions; 14 November 1990– 13 February 1991 (22; 39).

(2) European integration; referendum on bilateral agreement with EU; 21 March– 20 June 2001 (31; 46).

(2) European integration; agreement on EU constitution; 18 April–17 July 2004 (33; 66).

(2) Second Iraq war; 16 August– 15 November 2002 (46; 68).

(2) Constitutional reform; demise of Federalism Commission; 17 October 2004–16 January 2005 (32; 76). Foreign policy

(1) First Iraq war; beginning of hostilities; 17 November 1990–16 February 1991 (21; 29). (2) Second Iraq war; beginning of hostilities; 1 January– 31 March 2002 (22; 40).

(2) Constitutional reform; 1997 election; (2) Reform of direct 1 March–31 May 1997 democracy; referendum; (48; 142). 1 December 2003–28 February 2003 (31; 46).

(2) Electoral reform; 2000 election; 1 November 2000– 31 January 2001 (28; 37).



Table 2.5

(1) Old-age security reform; Bundestag decision on a raise of the VAT; 1 October– 31 December 1997 (22; 40). (2) Old-age security reform; Bundesrat decision on an inflation compensation for the retired; 6 September– 5 November 1999 (15; 20).

(1) Old-age security reform; referendum; 25 May–24 July 1995 (12; 15). (2) Old-age security reform; 16 March– 15 June 2004 (17; 47).

(1) Health reform; 1992 election; 9 February– 8 May 1992 (15; 16). (2) Health reform; 2001 election; 7 April–8 July 2001 (29; 43).

(1) Health reform; failure of the Clinton administration’s reform project; 26 July– 25 October 1994 (19; 27). (2) Health reform; signing of Medicare Reform Act; 8 October 2003–7 January 2004 (12; 15).

Case study corpus

126; 212

169; 343

223; 416

142; 214

Monitoring corpus

668; 1,212

432; 776

476; 697

798; 1,239



Social policy

54


●

●

a ‘monitoring’ corpus with (virtually) all pertinent articles and statements published in any section of the eight newspapers throughout the year 2004.18 a ‘case study’ corpus of articles and statements drawn in a similar fashion from newspaper coverage of debates on nationally specific topics of institutional reform, foreign and social policy; one such debate in the (early) 1990s and one in the (late) 1990s or 2000s – and the three-month time windows during which the respective debates climaxed – were examined for each country.

While the large corpus (made up of 2,374 articles and 3,924 individual legitimation statements) will be used to ‘monitor’ the basic structures of national legitimation discourses and, moreover, to identify the events or mechanisms linked with short-term fluctuations in the intensity or nature of legitimacy-related communication, the ‘case studies’ (660 articles and 1,205 statements altogether) enable us to shed further light on the long-term trajectories of this type of communication – that is, the change of discursive structures over time – and on the effects of issue contexts on legitimation discourses. Our study thus has a time horizon of roughly fifteen years and covers the time since the end of the Cold War. One might, of course, argue that globalization and related developments began much earlier, say, during the 1970s. However, in our view the 1990s represent a more important juncture. First, that decade brought about a marked intensification of globalization trends. Second, the end of the Cold War left the democratic nation state as a regime type without a serious competitor – a triumph that might ironically have fostered challenges to its legitimacy, as liberal democracies-cum-market economies can no longer be defended by simply comparing them with socialism as a readily available (and rhetorically very effective) negative reference point. As for the chosen policy fields, there is hardly an obvious link between globalization and political debates surrounding institutional reform – unless, of course, we were to make the rather strong argument that globalization requires, and indeed fosters, convergence towards a particular set of ‘competitive’ institutional arrangements; as suggested above, though, the institutionalist literature raises doubt about this strong convergence hypothesis. Yet the selected reform debates are closely tied to the ‘democracy’ and ‘rule of law/constitutionalism’



one or more legitimation statements – and established two distinct text corpora (Table 2.5):

principles of the democratic nation state (Hurrelmann and Leibfried et al. 2007a), and hence one should expect that these debates, more than any others, will usually be accompanied by – or turn into – genuine legitimation discourses. The other debates chosen for our case studies relate to foreign and social policy issues, and hence are tied to the ‘sovereignty/territoriality’ as well as the ‘intervention/welfare’ principles of the democratic nation state. The potential link between economic globalization, political internationalization, and performance or legitimacy challenges to the nation state appears more obvious in these fields than in the area of institutional reform – in both cases, we may safely assume rising pressures but reduced state autonomy and capacity, despite a number of potentially mediating factors, as well as competing hypotheses about the still remaining extent of state autonomy and capacity. Finally, the case studies were chosen with a view to highly salient political conflicts and debates in the respective countries and time periods. Such debates may, however, involve the discussion of genuinely legitimacy-related issues to a greater or lesser extent. We avoid a problematic selection bias – and create the opportunity to examine the degree to which different issue contexts foster more or less intense legitimation discourses – by holding the degree of conflict intensity constant and then examining the degree of legitimation intensity as a dependent variable. Coding and methods of data analysis In principle, a wide range of statistical (content analytical) and qualitative (discourse analytical) methods may be used to examine the material of our empirical study, namely, texts (Roberts 1997; Bauer and Gaskell 2000; Titscher et al. 2000; Neuendorf 2002; Fairclough 2003; Keller 2004; Krippendorff 2004; Wodak and Krzyzanowski 2008) and, more precisely, newspaper articles (Mautner 2008). There is, to be sure, a considerable amount of mutual suspicion between the two camps, and not much work that endeavours to bridge the presumptive epistemological and methodological gap between these research traditions. We would argue that the contrast between these traditions – and the implied one between Erklären and Verstehen – is frequently overstated, and, in any case, our own empirical study relies on elements of the two in order to gauge the scope and nature of legitimation discourses. Discourse analysts employing qualitative methods – put simply, the careful reading and interpretation of texts – usually stress the ‘holistic’ and culturally sensitive nature of this approach (Berger and Luckmann




1966; Luckmann 2001; Raufer 2005: 47–56). By contrast, content analysis in the Berelsonian tradition is usually justified against the backdrop of the mainstream, hypothesis-testing ‘scientific’ paradigm and its presumptive advantages. While we are certainly sympathetic to the argument of discourse analysts that meaning structures are not likely to be fully revealed by research that limits itself to the examination of ‘manifest’ content, our own study is, at first glance, resolutely in the content analytical tradition, as it examines large text corpora and a great number of legitimation statements by way of statistical methods. We certainly do not subscribe to the view that discourses are ‘inherently not quantifiable’ (Paul 2005: 9), or to the caricatures of quantitative research often given in the discourse analytical literature. After all, content analysis is itself a form of ‘simplified interpretation [that] transforms ... texts into “objectified” traces’ (Gaskell and Bauer 2001: 7) of communicative processes and discursive structures, and the dividing line between discourse and content analysis is, therefore, not nearly as impermeable as is often suggested. Our own study, moreover, aims at the ‘latent’ content of legitimacy-related texts and propositions; to identify and code legitimation statements, we were thus forced to go beyond the ‘surface’ of texts and to complement automated procedures with a considerable amount of interpretative work. Still, it is true that, while the quantitative findings of our study are ‘a basis for drawing grounded conclusions about the “dominance” of certain frames over others, and the “success” of some over others’ (Koopmans and Statham 1999: 216), they cannot fully ‘replace detailed studies of political discourse and framing on specific topics’ (219). Thus we concur with Gilley (2006b: 520), according to whom ‘qualitative analysis will remain indispensable to a full rendering of a quantitative legitimacy score in any one case’, suggesting a ‘necessary complementarity between ... large-n statistical and small-n qualitative statements’. Therefore none of the articles collected during the monitoring of legitimacy-related communication in 2004 were discarded once the coding was finished, and most of the legitimation statements cited as examples or interpreted in greater detail throughout the book are drawn from this corpus. The more limited size of our case study corpus invited even more in-depth qualitative consideration of the material, which notably enabled us to provide more nuanced explanations of ‘outliers’, and to study in greater detail the strategies that play a role in the legitimation of political systems and institutions.




It is, on the other hand, difficult to see how far-reaching empirical inferences on discursive structures and trajectories could be made without clarifying from which ‘population’ the examined texts were drawn, and without extracting at least some pertinent quantitative information on frequency distributions. As a matter of fact, inferences on the ‘hegemony’ of specific frames or positions – or, in our case, on the greater or lesser prevalence of specific legitimation objects, patterns, and styles in a given discourse – presuppose the availability of such quantitative information. These inferences are best made on the basis of large corpora that have been collated in a methodologically conscious fashion – and a large number of cases, in turn, makes it both possible and necessary to rely on statistical methods. The following study, therefore, combines an interpretative with a quantitative approach to examine legitimation statements and discourses in four national public spheres. Do we observe a ‘decline of support below a minimal level’ (Easton 1965: 156) in some or all of the examined political systems, an erosion of legitimacy levels that jeopardizes the stability or proper functioning of entire regimes or some of their institutions? Have there been shifts in the (democratic) foundations of their legitimacy? Do universal or context-dependent features and trends dominate the observed (de)legitimation practices? Finally, which strategies are employed by challengers and supporters of regimes and institutions in Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the United States? Any globalization-related challenges to the legitimacy of these four democracies – and strategies used to cope with them – will be of particular interest.




How Stable is the Legitimacy of the Democratic Nation State?

Have internationalization and deparliamentarization led to a legitimacy crisis of the democratic nation state? In this chapter, we turn to our empirical material and investigate to what extent the ‘erosion of legitimacy’ or ‘collapse of legitimacy’ hypotheses are correct, that is, whether there are indications of a type I or II legitimacy crisis in Swiss, German, British, and American legitimation discourses. If one of these crisis scenarios holds, media communication should be characterized by a predominance of delegitimating rather than legitimating evaluations of the four political systems and their core institutions, and legitimacy levels should fall as globalization progresses. However, in order to assess the existence of a clear and general trend in media communication towards more delegitimating evaluations, we first require a better understanding of the inner workings of legitimation discourses: how do such discourses arise, develop, and fade? The first section of this chapter reports on some pertinent insights gleaned from our examination of short-term discursive dynamics. The second section presents an overview of legitimating and delegitimating communication in Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the United States. The third section offers a more detailed picture of the way in which specific political institutions and regime principles – legitimation objects – are evaluated in each of the four countries.

How legitimacy becomes an issue: Legitimacy attention cycles As discussed in Chapter 2, we define legitimation statements as specific kinds of propositions – marked by evaluations not just of events, policies, or actors but of a political system’s key institutions and principles. Yet how frequent are such assessments within media reporting and commentaries 58 10.1057/9780230275331 - Democracy's Deep Roots, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner


3

on political issues writ large? From what kinds of debates do they originate, under what conditions do they gain ground for a certain period, and under what conditions are they once again superseded by other types of propositions that do not transport legitimacy-related claims? A glance at our monitoring corpus, first of all, suggests that legitimation statements are in fact quite rare. Out of a total of more than 380,000 articles that were, according to our database, published in the eight newspapers in 2004, roughly 2,400 contained one legitimation statement or more.1 This scarcity of legitimation statements lends even more significance to the question of how or why such propositions spring up in media debates. Our assumption is that legitimation statements represent a generalization of critical or affirmative evaluations related to individual policies, actors, or political processes. For instance, with regard to delegitimation, one may expect that, where discourse participants realize that their grievances cannot simply be put down to individual policies, actors, or processes, media debates turn to negative evaluations of the legitimacy of entire political systems or some of their core institutions and principles. In the 1992 British general election campaign, for example, the then leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, Paddy Ashdown, argued that the political system was seriously out of date, adding: ‘Next Tuesday you could elect the best politicians in the world. You could elect 650 saints; but it wouldn’t make any difference if our system of government no longer works’ (Times, 3 April 1992). In this example, the legitimation statement (‘our political system is out of date/no longer works’) originates from debates about the general election and contains the explicit claim that what appear to be weaknesses in political actors are in fact deficiencies of the regime as such. Similar generalizations may occur in the case of positive, legitimating evaluations. For instance, the success of policies can be taken as an occasion to voice positive assessments of the political institutions that produced them. Given the negative bias often attributed to media reporting, it is plausible to expect that such positive generalizations do not occur quite as often as negative ones. But, as our study shows, this bias is at least partially offset by the existence of specific political rituals in each country – such as opening sessions of parliament or presidential addresses – that are particularly conducive to affirmative rhetoric. Legitimation discourses are thus fuelled by debates about policies, actors, or processes, which are then generalized, moving the legitimacy of a regime with its core institutions and principles of government into the limelight. It might, then, be worthwhile to examine which political



Levels of Legitimacy 59

Democracy’s Deep Roots Table 3.1

Legitimation statements by country and issue area (2004, %)

Issue area

CH

DE

GB

US

Overall

Institutional processes and reforms Social and economic policy Foreign policy Domestic security and migration Culture and education Other issues

35.2

43.9

41.2

52.1

44.3

18.3

21.4

12.0

3.3

13.4

13.5 9.3

7.0 12.2

7.2 14.8

19.1 10.8

12.2 11.6

4.8

6.6

10.2

1.6

5.3

Total (n)

18.9 100.0 (776)

8.9 100.0 (1,212)

14.7 100.0 (697)

13.1

13.2

100.0 (1,239)

100.0 (3,924)

Note: CH = Switzerland, DE = Germany, GB = Great Britain, US = United States. Other issues = Other issue areas and policy fields, or no reference to politics at all beyond the legitimation statement itself.

contexts are most likely to generate legitimacy-related communication. Table 3.1 shows the results of this analysis for the year 2004. It demonstrates that the highest number of legitimation statements in each country originate from journal articles (or paragraphs) that focus on institutional arrangements and processes – such as elections, government reshuffles, and the political rituals referred to above – or discuss institutional reforms. To the extent that legitimation statements arise within more substantively policy-oriented debates, this mainly happens in the fields of social and economic policy, domestic security and migration, as well as foreign policy. Even more revealing than the aggregate numbers for 2004 are developments over time. As Figure 3.1 shows, there are temporary ups and downs in the number of legitimation statements that different issues generate. These fluctuations indicate that mediated discussions about specific policies, actors, or processes may trigger genuine legitimation debates that endure for a certain period of time. However, most of these debates subside rather quickly, either because the media completely turn away from the issue or because discussions cease to engage questions of legitimacy and shift back to mere policy or political debates. Accordingly, the peaks in Figure 3.1 can easily be linked to specific political events in each of the four countries. In Great Britain, for instance, the peak in the institutions curve in March 2004 was caused



60

40 30 20 10 0 2

3

4

5

8

9

10

11

80 60 40 20 0

12

1

2

3

4

5

Germany

80 60 40 20 0 1

2

3

4

5

6 7 Month

6 7 Month

8

9

10

11

12

Switzerland

Number of statements

100


6 7 Month

100

8

9

10

11

12

Institutions Social+economic policy Culture+education

60 50 40 30 20 10 0

1

2

3

4

5

6 7 Month

8

9

10

11

Homeland security+migration Foreign policy Others

Figure 3.1 Legitimacy attention cycles by country and issue area (2004) 10.1057/9780230275331 - Democracy's Deep Roots, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner

12


50

1

United States

120



Great Britain

60

by debates on the creation of a Supreme Court. In the United States, we can see the fallout from the presidential election (peaks in the institutions curve in the summer and autumn) and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal (a peak in the foreign policy curve in May). In Germany, labour market reforms (the peak in the economic and social policy curve in August) and reforms of the federal system (peaks in the institutions curve in October and December) produced the most heated legitimation debates. In Switzerland, finally, the spring peaks in the social and economic policy curve, as well as in the institutions curve, can be linked to a failed referendum on pension reform, which generated critical evaluations of the political system’s alleged gridlock. In most of these cases, once the respective events or policy-related controversies had passed, the legitimation debates that they activated also tended to die down. On the basis of these observations, we can now draw a more detailed picture of the way in which mass-media legitimation discourses typically arise, develop, and fade. Although there is, of course, a constant groundswell of references to legitimacy issues in everyday newspaper reporting, more focused and sustained debates that involve an actual exchange of different positions usually originate from specific political events or controversies in the course of which positive or negative evaluations of individual policies, actors, or processes are generalized to the political system as a whole. In cases of extreme intensity, the policy or political controversy and the legitimation debate arising from it will become more or less congruent, and hence it will become more and more probable that opinions expressed on the contested issues will contain legitimation statements. Once debates on these issues disappear from the media, however, the respective legitimation debates are also likely to dissipate – unless debates over other events or controversies continue to highlight the same legitimacy issues. Finally, legitimation debates may also subside if the policy or political debates that gave rise to them continue but cease to address issues of legitimacy. This happened, for instance, in the British debate over constitutional reform that we examined in one of our case studies. Two main themes of this debate – devolution and the reform of the House of Lords – were among the most important topics of both the 1992 and the 1997 general election campaigns. However, the landslide election of a Labour government in 1997 was widely interpreted as a decisive vote by the electorate in favour of such reforms. After the election, the heated debate over the legitimacy of the existing system of government thus cooled down considerably, while discussions on devolution and a reformed House of Lords continued but focused mainly on the details




63

of different reform proposals and procedural issues regarding their implementation. Two conclusions can be drawn from this example. First, it indicates that institutional reform constitutes a mechanism of ‘fixing’ legitimacy problems by repairing political objects perceived as illegitimate. Secondly, and more generally, the example shows that political events such as an election, or policy decisions in favour of or against certain reforms, may not only trigger legitimation discourses but can also play a role in ending them. Borrowing the concept of ‘issue attention cycles’ from Anthony Downs (1972), we may thus speak of legitimacy attention cycles: media attention to specific legitimacy issues is volatile and difficult to sustain over longer periods of time. But how do such legitimacy attention cycles operate in detail? Are the stages they go through similar to those identified by Downs? According to Downs, policy debates typically progress in five stages: (1) a pre-problem stage in which a political problem has not yet caught public attention; (2) a stage of ‘alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm’, usually triggered by a specific event through which the public becomes aware of the problem and, confident of the political community’s ability to overcome all obstacles, enters into a discussion of possible solutions; (3) a stage of realizing the cost of significant progress, in which this confidence fades, as the public, upon more intense reflection, becomes aware of the sacrifices it might have to make to implement effective solutions; (4) a stage of gradual decline in intense public interest, as people become discouraged or bored by the discussion, and other issues entering stage (2) assert more powerful claims upon public interest; and finally (5) a post-problem stage in which the issue ‘moves into a prolonged limbo – a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest’ (Downs 1972: 40). Downs stresses that issues that have been through the cycle once do not just shift back to the pre-problem stage but generally receive higher average levels of attention than those issues that have never been intensely discussed. In some respects, legitimation debates appear to follow this pattern quite closely. For one thing, the majority of legitimacy attention cycles in the four countries were indeed triggered by events pointing to some kind of legitimacy problem. In other words, temporary upsurges in legitimacy-related communication surrounding a certain issue are more likely to originate in events that were, at least initially, interpreted as having delegitimating implications – legitimating (positive) evaluations tend to gain ground in the later stages of the legitimacy attention cycle, in addition to making up much of the groundswell of legitimacy



Levels of Legitimacy


related communication not linked to one of the more intense legitimation debates. Also in line with Downs’s description, we can identify a fair number of legitimacy attention cycles that conform quite well to the sequence of alarmed discovery of legitimacy problems and debates about the need for far-reaching reform (stage 2), followed by a phase of reflection in which the upsides of the current state of affairs and the costs of significant changes are increasingly stressed (stage 3). A case in point is the political crisis in the wake of the disputed November 2000 presidential election in the United States (Ackerman 2002; Dworkin 2002; Jacobson and Rosenfeld 2002). The events in Florida and the subsequent political and legal manoeuvres of the two presidential candidates, George W. Bush and Al Gore, are prime examples of triggering events. The ‘alarmed discovery’ of a whole series of flaws of the electoral system – some of which had been publicly discussed before but had virtually disappeared from media agendas for a couple of years – triggered not only policy or institutional reform debates but genuine legitimation discourses as well. For a short period, the many irregularities of the voting procedures in Florida (and elsewhere), the inability of the system to produce a clear winner, and the ultimate victory of a candidate who had failed to win a popular majority at the hands of a conspicuously politicized Supreme Court were discussed in terms of fundamental normative criteria such as equality, fairness, and justice – and as problems that cast doubt on the legitimacy of the entire political system and its core institutions. A variety of solutions were discussed as well. Yet the costs of a thorough reform of the American electoral system – both in terms of the price of state-of-the-art voting machinery or voter education programmes and in terms of political capital – soon became apparent. Increasingly, voices defending the status quo in spite of all its imperfections, or at least pointing to its positive aspects – such as the fact that the Supreme Court issued a verdict that was finally accepted – gained ground: ‘Like it or not, [our electoral system] isn’t perfect. Mistakes are made. However, the mistakes balance out for both parties’ (New York Times, 22 November 2000). Leaving aside the winning camp, which obviously had no interest in questioning the legitimacy of the procedures and institutions that ensured Bush’s victory, Gore and the Democrats were the first to realize that drawing out the legal and political battle further after the Supreme Court ruling in December would cost them dearly. Our material suggests that electoral system reform was largely dead as a legitimacy issue after Gore’s concession, or Bush’s inauguration at the latest. As a policy issue, it stayed on the



64

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agenda for some time, but political actors soon realized that a thorough reform, which would – among other things – have touched upon the federal distribution of responsibilities, was largely out of the question. Actual reform efforts remained piecemeal. Moreover, public interest had already massively declined and reached the post-problem stage by the time the political system ‘delivered’. And of course, the events of 9/11 fully crowded out attention to the issue. This example illustrates that a surge of delegitimating communication following a major scandal need not necessarily contribute to an erosion of regime support in the long run. Like other discourses, legitimacy-related communication may be conceptualized as a drama that ‘involves a background of scenery and sound, and a foreground of plot, actors, reasoning and, on occasion, tragic outcomes’ (Bauer et al. 2001: 35). Hence the occasional surge of delegitimating communication in established democracies may often have a cathartic function: [C]lassical drama theory suggests that in a world where passions are absent, they need to be raised, and where they are too high and overwhelming, they need to be contained. In this manner, drama cultivates human virtues and prepares for effective collective action. This is achieved by the ‘homeopathic living-through’ of these passions in the vicarious reality of reading, watching scenes and images, and listening to arguments about issues. (Bauer et al. 2001: 35) The legitimation rituals of political elites further dampen any peaks of delegitimating communication and contribute to this cathartic effect. However, not all legitimacy attention cycles are characterized by such dynamics of gradual relegitimation. There are cases in which the discovery phase (stage 2 in Downs’s model) is already characterized by a balanced exchange of legitimating and delegitimating arguments, and the reflection phase (stage 3) is marked more by a shift to different kinds of media texts – more analytical commentary as opposed to mere reporting – than by an increase in legitimating statements. This version of the attention cycle may once again be illustrated with the help of the debate on constitutional reform in Great Britain, and, more specifically, the debate over the proposal to create a US-style Supreme Court. This reform, which involved moving the Law Lords out of the House of Lords, was first announced by Tony Blair in June 2003. In January 2004, a legislative proposal was presented. Although it immediately met with opposition in the House of Lords, no largescale legitimation debate unfolded until the beginning of March. Then,





in a public lecture one week before the proposal was to be debated again in the upper house, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, linked the reform proposal, which in his view would have created a Supreme Court too weak in relation to parliament, to a clause from the Asylum and Immigration Bill that was to prevent courts from hearing appeals against decisions from immigration tribunals. Lord Woolf argued that both proposals amounted to an encroachment on judicial independence that might threaten the rule of law. Thus, as in the ‘Bush v. Gore’ case, it was a specific event – in this case the discursive intervention of an important political actor – that triggered the legitimation debate. By linking two policies (constitutional reform and asylum law) and connecting them to an overarching principle of government (the rule of law), a generalization was achieved that lifted the debate to a new status. However, Lord Woolf’s intervention was immediately countered by Home Secretary David Blunkett, who accused judges of exploiting judicial review and usurping ‘real democracy’. A vigorous argument subsequently unfolded about the rule of law and the relationship between the executive, legislature, and judiciary. Newspapers reporting immediately after Lord Woolf’s lecture mainly reproduced his comments and Blunkett’s reply. From the following week on, however, a number of more analytical pieces – partly by guest authors – were published. The debate remained acrimonious and was clearly not ‘resolved’ in any sense, but, after the House of Lords had decided to delay the adoption of the proposal, media interest both in the fate of the reform proposals and in the legitimacy issues that they raised subsided. By the end of March, some comments advancing legitimation statements were still being published, but in April, another event pushed the issue out of the headlines altogether, namely, the decision by Tony Blair to hold a referendum on the draft EU Constitution. Different legitimacy issues therefore moved into the limelight: the quality of British democracy compared with that of the EU, the country’s long-standing anti-Europeanism, and the utility of referendums in a parliamentary democracy. We may conclude that legitimacy attention cycles are not always characterized by the relegitimating dynamics suggested by the analogy to Downs’s model, but nevertheless proceed in similar phases: (1) a prelegitimation stage in which an issue is not debated at all, or at least has not yet been associated with legitimacy problems; (2) a discovery stage in which the media begin to include legitimacy evaluations in their coverage of political events or controversies; (3) a reflection stage in which the legitimacy problem is explicitly confronted in a more



66

analytical fashion, even in the absence of a concrete event that serves as a hinge for media reporting; (4) a stage of decline in which the legitimacy problem is suddenly or gradually displaced by other events which either resolve the legitimacy problem (for instance, in the case of institutional reform) or bring up new problems that now take centre stage; and finally (5) a postlegitimation stage in which the legitimation debate comes to an end, at least for the time being. This model can be fleshed out by drawing on a number of further observations related to the mechanisms that either heat up or cool down legitimation debates as they pass through the cycle. In the discovery stage, the debate is heated up if a series of events taking place within a relatively short period of time secures almost continuous media reporting, and thus a prolonged or repeated passage through the discovery stage. On the other hand, if only one isolated event triggers the legitimation debate, or if rival events quickly direct public attention to other concerns, the debate is less likely to develop any particular intensity. In the reflection phase, one crucial factor that stimulates debate is the willingness of the media, or of prominent guest commentators (for instance, intellectuals), to publish more analytical commentaries on the issue. Otherwise, the legitimacy attention cycle might get stuck at the discovery stage, that is, legitimation debates will end as soon as there are no more immediate events to report on. For example, a motion by the Christian Democratic opposition in the German Bundestag in November 2004 to define a German ‘leading culture’ (Leitkultur), to which immigrants were to adapt, caused a brief flurry of reports, often containing legitimacy evaluations, for as long as the Bundestag debated the issue. But, as the issue had already been intensely discussed some years before, the newspapers in our sample did not see fit to focus on this topic in their editorial or commentary sections. Hence, as soon as the debate among politicians ended, the issue disappeared from media reporting as well. An extensive reflection stage, by contrast, can help to keep legitimation debates simmering long after the events that originally triggered them have passed. This is especially likely if a whole series of events which have previously been debated individually – that is, have gone through separate discovery stages – are combined in media commentaries and linked to the same underlying legitimacy issues. This is in fact more common than might appear at first sight. For example, in countries with a high number of veto players, such as Germany and Switzerland, failed reform attempts in diverse policy sectors often result in similar debates over the alleged tendency of their political orders to produce political stalemates.





With respect to the postlegitimation stage, our observations underscore Downs’s hypothesis that issues which have already been through the attention cycle are more likely than others to be rediscovered in public debates. A German debate on the legitimacy of torture in emergency situations provides a good example. This debate originally began in October 2002 when a high-ranking police officer in the city of Frankfurt admitted to threatening a suspect in a case of child abduction with torture. The debate flared up repeatedly for short periods of time in the German media debates of 2004: in January, when the police officer was charged with coercion; in May, when the Abu Ghraib scandal brought other instances of torture to public attention; in October, when a number of academic publications on the issue appeared; and in December, when the verdict against the officer was returned. In all of these cases, the debate did not pass through the full legitimacy attention cycle but simply invoked the debates that were still present in collective memory, thus in a sense returning to the reflection stage of the older cycle. This does not mean, however, that legitimation debates are necessarily subject to a ‘ratchet effect’, when discussions lock in at a particular level of intensity and do not fall beneath it. Instead, we are dealing solely with intermittent recurrences, which generally end as quickly as they began. We can hypothesize that the main factor that usually prevents a ratchet effect is the presence of competing issues. Only if media reporting on various political events continuously fuels one and the same legitimation debate might anything like an escalation be a probable result. It is crucial to realize the importance of legitimacy attention cycles for the legitimacy of the democratic nation state. The fact that the issues triggering legitimation debates often undergo rather short cycles suggests that it is difficult to sustain public interest in a political system’s specific legitimacy deficits over longer periods of time. Put another way, the short-lived nature of media interest makes it unlikely that legitimation debates emanating from specific policies or political processes remain on media agendas long enough to really have a lasting impact on people’s legitimacy beliefs.2 This volatility of legitimation discourses may alone serve to shield the democratic nation state from many potentially serious threats to its legitimacy. It is thus plausible to sketch a scenario of ‘stability through change’ – precisely because legitimation debates seldom focus on one and the same issue for long, the overall legitimacy of the nation state is, other things being equal, quite well protected. This hypothesis, however, is no substitute for a more detailed empirical analysis of legitimating and delegitimating tendencies in media debates, to which we now turn.



68


Having gained a better understanding of the ways in which legitimation statements spring up and die down in mass-media communication, we can now examine the evidence for a possible erosion of legitimacy in Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the United States. Before we turn to our data, it makes sense to consider briefly how such an erosion might manifest itself in legitimation discourses. After all that we have said about the origins of legitimacy-related communication, it is clear that neither the fact that issues of legitimacy are debated at all nor the appearance of some delegitimating evaluations necessarily has to be considered problematic. If the ‘critical citizens’ argument is taken seriously, a certain volume of public debate has, rather, to be viewed as a normatively desirable sign of democratic health (Norris 1999b; Barker 2007: 28–31). Given the alleged negative bias of media reporting (Eilders 1997; but see Norris 2000) already referred to above, as well as the fact that legitimacy is unlikely to be discussed explicitly as long as it is seen as unproblematic, we should not be surprised even if negative statements were usually somewhat more frequent than positive ones. Legitimacy-related communication may be expected to be most intense against the backdrop of genuine political conflicts, and hence to be characterized almost per definitionem by a give and take of critical and affirmative evaluations. Thus we should typically observe relatively balanced distributions of legitimating and delegitimating statements where legitimacy is explicitly discussed, and even relatively high shares of critical propositions do not necessarily indicate crisis situations. By contrast, the interpretation of very lopsided distributions is more straightforward, despite such ambiguities. In the following, therefore, we speak of low, high, and medium levels of legitimacy whenever the share of positive statements is below onethird, above two-thirds or between the two thresholds, respectively. Since we expect legitimation debates in democratic contexts to be characterized by a give and take of arguments, a ‘typical’ debate should display medium levels of legitimacy. Especially interesting for our study, however, are extreme cases of particularly high and, even more so, particularly low legitimacy. Our admittedly formal thresholds ensure that only a clear preponderance of delegitimating statements – consistently low levels of discursive support or marked trends in that direction – will be considered as unequivocal indicators for a legitimacy crisis of entire political systems or one of their core institutions.3



Is the legitimacy of the democratic nation state eroding?


Legitimating and delegitimating tendencies: One full year of legitimation debates (2004) For the analysis of legitimating and delegitimating tendencies in the mass-media, we begin again with a look at our monitoring corpus of legitimation statements in 2004. The data reveal mixed evidence on possible legitimacy problems. Most importantly, while the majority of evaluations in the text corpus are delegitimating, the overall level of legitimacy may still be qualified as medium: about 43 per cent of all legitimation statements give a positive assessment of the legitimation object to which they refer, while 57 per cent are negative. However, we observe marked differences between the individual countries. Delegitimating statements dominate the national discourse in Great Britain so clearly that it seems adequate to speak of a low overall level of legitimacy (only 33.0 per cent positive statements). The legitimacy levels of Germany (40.9 per cent), Switzerland (42.9 per cent), and particularly the United States – where we even find a preponderance of positive evaluations (52.0 per cent) – provide far less reason for concern. This finding nurtures scepticism with regard to undifferentiated crisis diagnoses. Moreover, it suggests that, even if worldwide trends such as internationalization and deparliamentarization have an impact on national legitimation discourses, their influence is mediated by national factors. But what might such national factors be? Our discussion so far has already made it clear that one aspect that could play a key role is the policy or political context from which legitimation debates arise. After all, Figure 3.1 showed that legitimacy attention cycles in 2004 were palpably national in character, and hence no common patterns across two or more countries are apparent. To what extent, then, are the issues that trigger legitimation debates relevant to the overall legitimating or delegitimating character of debates? Figure 3.2 suggests a link. Apparently, political contexts differ not only with respect to the likelihood with which they generate legitimation statements but also in terms of the type of evaluation – critical or affirmative – that they tend to produce. For instance, in all countries, an above-average proportion of statements arising out of debates about institutional processes, or about social and economic policy issues, is delegitimating (in the United States, however, where the overall discourse slightly tilts towards the positive, delegitimating and



To find out whether there is evidence for such a crisis in our four countries, the remainder of this section presents a broad overview of our aggregate findings, that is, for all objects of legitimation combined. In the following section we turn to the results obtained for individual objects.

Levels of Legitimacy 71 30 20

Soc./Econ. 0

Foreign Sec./Migr.

−10

Cult./Educ.

−20 −30

Figure 3.2 (2004)

CH

DE

GB

US

Legitimating or delegitimating tendency of issue debates by country

Note: Values were calculated by subtracting the percentage of de-legitimating statements in each issue category from 50.0 per cent. Columns pointing upwards thus indicate a legit imating tendency of the respective issue debate, columns pointing downwards a delegitimating one.

legitimating evaluations in the context of institutional reform debates are also fairly balanced). Statements published in the context of debates on domestic security and migration, by contrast, are mainly legitimating, and statements in the context of debates on foreign policy also tend to result in positive evaluations in all countries except Great Britain. Of course, the individual debates and controversies subsumed under these issue categories differ considerably both within and between the countries under study here. For instance, debates categorized under the heading of social and economic policy in Switzerland concerned questions of both pension reform and banking secrecy. Legitimation debates arising out of discussions on foreign policy in the United States were dominated by the issue of the Iraq War, while foreign policy legitimation debates in Germany dealt extensively with other issues, such as the EU Constitution. And even one and the same issue can be framed quite differently. While discussions about Iraq mainly resulted in positive evaluations of domestic institutions in the United States, similar discussions in Great Britain were much more critical. This underlines the fact that our typology of issue categories cannot replace in-depth studies of individual debates. But the general tendencies apparent in Figure 3.2 are remarkable nonetheless. For one thing, they indicate that various political contexts are more or less likely to produce legitimating



Inst.

10

or delegitimating communication. For another, they show that if internationalization (and the deparliamentarization that it often triggers) has a negative impact on national legitimation discourses at all, this impact is more likely be indirect than immediate. Debates about foreign policy, after all, mainly produce legitimating communication about national institutions. But, of course, it cannot be ruled out that other findings, such as the overwhelmingly delegitimating character of statements from debates over social and economic policy, reflect globalization processes and the pressures towards global competitiveness and welfare state retrenchment that they entail. Still, the overall conclusion that can be drawn from this overview of legitimation discourses in 2004 is that no persuasive evidence for a general erosion of the democratic nation state’s legitimacy can be discerned. Only in one of our four countries, namely Great Britain, do levels of legitimacy seem to be seriously low; by contrast, legitimating and delegitimating evaluations are more or less evenly distributed in the United States, Germany, and Switzerland. However, apart from the fact that national legitimation discourses are obviously far from homogeneous and will therefore be examined in much greater depth in the analysis that follows, we have to keep in mind that the data for 2004 represent no more than a snapshot view of one particular year. The tendencies observed in this one year do not necessarily point to longterm trends within national legitimation discourses, but might equally represent short-term effects of the specific political events that shaped that year’s media reporting – such as the debate over government lies on the Iraq War in Great Britain, or the presidential election in the United States. After all, the existence of legitimacy attention cycles implies that long-term changes can only be observed once we have discounted short-term fluctuations. Legitimating and delegitimating trends: Critical issues and their ramifications (1990–2004) Our case studies are designed specifically for this purpose. They focus on three policy fields that we expected to be characterized by particularly intense political debates – institutional reforms, social and foreign policy – and trace discourses within these policy fields or issue areas over time. More precisely, we concentrated on two three-month periods for each case, selecting time periods in which public discussions about the respective policies or reform initiatives were particularly heated. Thus we looked at the three issue areas at times in which they were actually in the limelight of media interest and did not take a back seat




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to other topics. In contrast to our monitoring of legitimation debates for the year 2004 alone, this procedure allows inferences on trends in legitimation discourses – albeit cautious ones, as the case studies zero in on narrower segments of political and legitimacy-related communication than our monitoring corpus, and only two points in time were compared for each of the three specific issue areas. Nevertheless, it can be assumed that, if a gradual erosion of legitimacy in our four countries – and convergence in that regard – has indeed occurred, such a broad development should be observable in our case studies. However, intense policy debates need not translate into equally intense legitimation debates. In fact, the intensity levels of legitimation debates point to one of the respects in which such debates may change: even if legitimacy levels remain constant, increased intensity could signal greater public engagement with a legitimacy problem, while reduced intensity suggests that it is not seen as particularly urgent. Even low legitimacy levels, then, do not necessarily indicate an alarming situation if the intensity of a debate is also low, whereas a very intense debate might be interpreted as a cause for concern even if legitimacy levels remain medium. But this claim is surely debatable. After all, the fact that the legitimacy of core institutions and principles is controversially discussed might be seen as a necessary – and positive – effect of democratic self-government, whereas low intensity levels might indicate a lack of political interest. On the other hand, while we do not wish to suggest that some degree of political apathy is in fact a prerequisite for a democracy’s governability (Crozier et al. 1975), it is also clear that a democracy does require a modicum of consensus regarding its core institutions and principles. Against the background of this controversy, we included in our case study a measure for the intensity of legitimation debates. It was arrived at by calculating the share of articles within the respective policy debates that contained at least one legitimation statement. Again, as with the legitimacy levels, we differentiate between high, medium, and low levels of intensity.4 These values provide a benchmark that enables us to assess how likely policy debates were to produce legitimation statements, and constitute a good standard by which to compare the intensity of legitimation debates arising out of different issues, and at different points in time. Table 3.2 summarizes the legitimacy and intensity levels for each of our case studies; Figure 3.3 maps the changes between the first and the second time window examined. Most importantly, both show marked differences between the three policy fields. In all four countries, the case




Case studies: Intensity and legitimacy levels CH

DE

GB

US

Institutional reforms

(1) Reform of direct democracy • Intensity: High • Legitimacy: Medium (2) Reform of direct democracy • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Medium

(1) Constitutional reform • Intensity: High • Legitimacy: Medium (2) Constitutional reform • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Low

(1) Constitutional reform • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Low (2) Constitutional reform • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Medium

(1) Electoral reform • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Low (2) Electoral reform • Intensity: Medium • Legitimacy: Medium

Foreign policy

(1) European integration • Intensity: High • Legitimacy: Medium (2) European integration • Intensity: Medium • Legitimacy: Medium

(1) First Iraq war • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Low (2) Second Iraq war • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Medium

(1) European integration • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Medium (2) European integration • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Medium

(1) First Iraq war • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: High (2) Second Iraq war • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: High

(1) Pension reform • Intensity: Medium • Legitimacy: Medium (2) Pension reform • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Low

(1) Pension reform • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Low (2) Pension reform • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Low

(1) Health reform • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Medium (2) Health reform • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Low

(1) Health reform • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Low (2) Health reform • Intensity: Low • Legitimacy: Low

Social policy

Note: Intensity – low < 21 per cent, medium 21–42 per cent, high > 42 per cent. Legitimacy – low < 33.3 per cent, medium 33.3–66.7 per cent, high > 66.7 per cent.



Table 3.2


75

100 90 80

low

Legitimacy level (%)

70 60 UK-for 50

US-inst

UKsoc

CH-inst

CH-for

CH-soc

40 GER-for 30 US-soc US-soc

UK-inst

GER-inst

20 GER10 soc 0 0

10

20 low

30

40

50

60

Intensity level (%) high

Figure 3.3 Case studies: Shifts in intensity and legitimacy levels (1990–2004)

study on institutional reforms stands out as the one in which the share of legitimacy-related articles within the relevant media debates – that is, the intensity of debates – is highest. Some of the debates on institutional reforms surveyed in the four countries also displayed fairly low levels of legitimacy – that is, a large number of delegitimating as opposed to legitimating statements. However, Germany is the sole country in which we can find anything like an escalation of delegitimating tendencies. In response to the failed attempt to reform the country’s federal system in 2003/2004, the regime and its elites were increasingly portrayed as incapable of overcoming political stalemate. But, while legitimacy levels sank in comparison to an earlier period of constitutional reform, when the Basic Law was amended in the wake of reunification in 1994, the intensity of legitimation debates also receded, indicating that



high

US-for

policy-oriented debates still continued, and that the search for solutions did not break down completely (eventually an agreement, though to many experts unsatisfactory, was found in 2005). Great Britain, by contrast, provides examples of how successful institutional reforms can diffuse legitimation problems. The reforms enacted after the Labour Party’s rise to power in 1997 considerably cooled down debates over the deficits of the Westminster system; Figure 3.3, therefore, reveals sinking intensity and rising legitimacy levels. The Swiss case demonstrates that, if institutional reform is conceived as being too radical, it might also harbour risks for the legitimacy of a political system. The reform of direct democracy discussed in 1995 proposed restrictions on central elements of direct democracy by increasing the number of signatures necessary to start initiatives and referendums. It caused exceptionally heated debates – and was ultimately rejected by parliament in 1999. In reaction to this outcome, a reduced version of the reform attempt was drawn up which was much less controversial, as it merely proposed extensions of direct democracy (a version that was finally passed in 2003). This resulted not only in a reduced intensity of the debate but also in higher legitimacy levels, as most of the delegitimating arguments that had been used to justify the earlier proposal were no longer referred to in public debates. In the United States, deficits in the country’s electoral system, over the years, generated only short phases of – sometimes very critical – legitimation debates, but these never captured the public interest for a prolonged period of time. As discussed above, the issue was then pushed to the foreground in the wake of the 2000 presidential election, but this intensification of the legitimation debate also implied that many political actors who had thus far remained silent rushed to the defence of the electoral system – the result was a rise rather than a reduction in legitimacy levels. In line with the data for 2004, the case studies on social policy indicate that legitimacy evaluations made in this context have an exceptionally strong negative bias. What is more, the particular debates surveyed – reforms of the healthcare systems in Great Britain and the United States, pension reforms in Germany and Switzerland – usually became even more critical of the four political systems as time passed (with the exception of Germany, where – though at a very low level – legitimacy remained more or less unchanged). The British example, in which we compared debates on the National Health Service (NHS) in 1992 and 2001, can be used to illustrate this development. While in 1992 the Conservative government vigorously




fought off claims that an allegedly unsatisfactory performance of the NHS threatened the legitimacy of the British state, the Labour government that was in power in 2001 explicitly accepted most points of criticism. Apparently, the Health Service’s performance crisis – which in media debates was often associated with the dismal state of other public services in the country (rail services, schools, and so on) – had become too manifest to be denied, and Prime Minister Tony Blair based his campaign strategy for the general election on a promise of dramatically increased healthcare funding. As almost no one was prepared to defend the status quo, legitimacy levels in the healthcare debates in 2001 dropped considerably compared with 1992. However, the debate was not particularly intense in either case, and only a small fraction of all articles concerned with health care touched on issues of legitimacy at all. A similar pattern can be discerned in the other three countries: where social policy debates do generate legitimacy evaluations, the rate of delegitimation is unusually high, but most discussions in this issue area are simply not framed as legitimation debates. Finally, in the case studies on foreign policy, we observe high or medium levels of legitimacy. Only in Germany, where foreign policy controversies often evoke negative images tainted by the country’s bellicose history, do legitimating levels remain clearly below 50 per cent – though still higher than in all other German case studies. In Great Britain and Switzerland, where we studied debates about the European Union, the legitimacy of the respective political system is often backed by comparisons with the allegedly less legitimate system of the EU (this use of comparisons as a legitimating strategy will be further examined in Chapter 5). Not surprisingly, perhaps, legitimating tendencies in foreign policy debates are most pronounced in the United States, where our case studies focused on the Iraq Wars of 1990/91 and 2003. In both time windows, the wars provoked low intensity but highly affirmative legitimation debates. Of course, the low intensity levels do not mean that there was little media coverage of the two wars – on the contrary, the volume of media coverage was quite substantial in each case. Yet the proportion of articles touching upon the legitimacy of the American political system remained low, and those that did contain legitimation statements often turned into striking relegitimations. One explanation for this outcome concerns the nature of the issue (going to war) and the kinds of discursive strategies that it facilitates. In both instances, the majority of discourse participants rallied behind the flag, and the boundaries between ‘us’ (the American political community) and ‘them’ (the Iraqi enemy)





were sharply defined. This made comparative strategies in which the United States is contrasted with other political orders – in this case, the dictatorial regime in Iraq, or perhaps the United Nations – particularly viable and successful. In addition, the effects of issue and legitimacy attention cycles are also nicely illustrated by this example. Issues that might have entailed threats to the legitimacy of the political system – such as the President’s contested war powers – were touched upon in the media every now and then but were quickly pushed off the agenda by reports on topics such as the troop build-up or last-minute diplomatic initiatives prior to the outbreak of war. When the two wars (both prime examples of the new phenomenon of ‘media’ wars; Musolff 1994) had started, attention was fully diverted to the military operations themselves. And while other case studies mainly illustrate the role of political events that trigger discussions over legitimacy problems, this case study also highlights the role of events that contribute to an affirmation of legitimacy – namely, the short, ‘patriotic’ congressional debates concluding with the passing of war resolutions. Despite all the conflict in the weeks prior to the resolutions, these debates and their outcomes stressed consensus between Democrats and Republicans, Congress and the President. As such, they served as legitimating political rituals, providing the public with a powerful signal of national solidarity and stable legitimacy. All in all, as Figure 3.3 makes abundantly clear, the case studies do not suggest a comprehensive, unidirectional trend towards more intense legitimation debates or eroding legitimacy. In terms of intensity levels, most of them, rather, reveal drops in intensity, indicating that legitimacy issues are not viewed as particularly urgent. With respect to legitimacy levels, there seems to be a general decrease only in the field of social policy. On the other hand, debates in this policy field are not particularly intense. By contrast, the most heated debates are fought over institutional reforms. But here, no consistent delegitimating trend emerges – except for Germany, where legitimacy levels fell. Finally, debates in the field of foreign policy mainly result in the legitimation of the political systems in question, producing aboveaverage levels of legitimacy. Comparing the four countries across all three policy domains, legitimacy levels appear to be slightly higher in the United States and Britain than in Switzerland and Germany, but even in these two countries there is no consistent trend towards delegitimation that cuts across different policies and proves to be stable over time.



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It remains to be asked whether potential legitimacy crises might not be restricted ‘only’ to specific institutions, rather than affecting the political systems of our four countries as a whole. In this section, following our examination of general legitimacy levels and trends, we therefore turn our attention to different objects of legitimation, and to the role they play in legitimation processes. Clearly, the question of who or what is evaluated is of central importance. In our conceptualization, a media statement only qualifies as a legitimation statement if its object – be it the political system as a whole or one of its core institutions and regime principles – is explicitly named. Identifying the objects to which legitimacy evaluations refer was, therefore, a crucial step in collating the corpus of statements included in our analysis. What is more, an examination of the role played by different objects in the four countries also generates important insights regarding the extent to which these countries might be threatened by a legitimacy crisis. Before we turn to this analysis, however, a few conceptual remarks are in order. Objects of legitimation: Types and hierarchies Max Weber (1978), in his theory of legitimacy, did not distinguish between various addressees of legitimacy evaluations; he only applied the concept of legitimacy to political orders as a whole. It was David Easton (1965) who first introduced the idea that different objects of legitimation exist within one and the same political system. According to Easton, the distinction between such objects is important in order to identify ‘[w]hat elements of a system are most relevant to its capacity to persist in the face of a threatened loss of support’, as well as to categorize ‘those aspects of a system with respect to which support may vary independently and with respect to which fluctuations in the level of support may stimulate stress’ on the system (1965: 172). Easton distinguished three types of objects: political community, regime, and authorities. The first type, political community, comprises two aspects: on the one hand the factual coherence of a group of persons, which is reproduced through participation in structuration processes within the group and institutionalized through its membership criteria and an internal division of political labour – which for Easton constitutes the ultimate object of support; and on the other hand the members’ sense of belonging to the group that can serve as an indicator for cohesion and the group’s continuation as a political community (1965: 184). According to Easton, a political system is put



The evaluation of specific institutions


under stress if support for any one of these aspects of political community wanes. The regime is subdivided into three components: values (goals and principles) ‘which impose constraints on the purposes for which the energies and resources of the system may be committed’ (Easton 1965: 194), norms as ‘operating rules’ which ‘specify the way in which members of a system are expected to behave in political life’ (200), and regime structure, limited mainly to the structure of authority, which is conceptualized as a regime’s way of making and executing decisions (205). All of these components constrain and justify political activity, thus defining the context of political interaction. Again, for Easton, the survival of a political system requires support for all three aspects of the regime. Finally, the term ‘authorities’ refers to the persons who occupy political positions, which implies a distinction between offices and their incumbents. Especially in democratic systems, office holders tend to be more easily replaced than elements of the political community or regime. Easton (1965: 216) comments that serious problems for the stability of the regime only arise in the ‘historically most unusual but possible condition’ in which criticism is no longer limited to the current incumbents of government offices or parliamentary mandates, but, instead, no authorities whatsoever ‘are seen as being equal to the task of managing the affairs of state and confidence in any set of authorities or any government is completely undermined’. A number of more recent contributions to empirical legitimacy research have modified and extended Easton’s concept in an attempt to better gauge a political order’s legitimacy in its full complexity (for an overview, see Westle 2007). The most influential of these adaptations is Pippa Norris’ (1999b) fivefold categorization of objects distinguishing (1) political community, (2) regime principles, (3) regime performance, (4) regime institutions, and (5) political actors. Underlying this conception is the idea of a hierarchy of objects, based on the notion that an erosion of support for political actors or specific regime institutions has less impact on the survival of the political order than an erosion of support for higher-level objects. Norris also links these objects to the different types of political support distinguished by Easton (1965, 1975), arguing that support for lower-level objects tends to be specific (that is, dependent on the benefits obtained from the respective object), while support for higherlevel objects is to a larger extent diffuse (that is, independent of the object’s output or performance).



80

81

Upon closer inspection, however, Norris’s model is not convincing. In the first place, it is unclear why a connection should necessarily exist between political objects and types of support: fundamental regime principles might well be evaluated in narrow instrumental terms, and, conversely, specific government institutions and even political actors may become objects of diffuse support. Secondly, Norris’s hierarchy of objects carries some questionable normative implications. In particular, the fact that the political community stands at the top of the hierarchy points to an inappropriately nation-centric understanding of the political. Norris herself justifies this choice by arguing that ‘agreement about the boundaries of the political community is the essential precondition for the foundation of any stable nation-state’ (1999b: 10). The scope of the political community is thus granted priority over the substantial qualities of the regime, a conception also reflected in the linkage between political objects and different kinds of support. Thus a diffuse sense of belonging to a national community is seen as preceding the more rational task of institutional design. From the point of view of democratic theory, however, prioritizing the political community over the qualities of the regime is not convincing. Even if a political community falls apart, this will not constitute a problem for democracy as long as the dissolution of the political community takes place in accordance with democratic principles, and the new entities that emerge also set up Table 3.3

Objects of legitimation: Aggregate and individual categories

(1) Regime principles

Sovereignty (territoriality) Rule of law, constitutionalism Democracy – Direct, representative democracy – Westminster, consensus democracy – Parliamentary, presidential democracy Welfare state

(2) Political community or system as a whole

Political community (nation) Political system

(3) Political institutions

Monarchy, republic Legislative branch Executive branch Judicial branch Electoral system Unitary, federal system

(4) Groups of actors

Political class, elites Party system Interest group system




democratic regimes. From the point of view of democratic theory, therefore, the highest good is not the survival of the political community but that of democracy. A reorganization of political spaces and collectives is acceptable, but a regime change towards non-democratic forms of government is not. In the light of these considerations, our study works with a typology of legitimation objects that is based on a different hierarchy. We distinguish four levels of objects (Table 3.3). (1) Regime principles: These are the basic normative principles that define the Western democratic nation state as a distinct regime type, possessing – or at least aspiring to possess – the attributes of sovereignty (required to protect its territory and the physical integrity of its citizens), a constitutional order enshrining the rule of law, some form of a democratic government enabling the citizens’ collective self- determination, and an interventionist state contributing to the citizens’ social welfare. Since these principles are widely accepted as normative pillars of Western democracies, and mutually support each other in a synergetic constellation (Leibfried and Zürn 2005; Hurrelmann and Leibfried et al. 2007a), we assume that any sustained delegitimation of these objects would lead to the most severe type of legitimacy crisis imaginable in this regime form. Since we are particularly interested in the legitimacy of democratic regimes, we further subdivide the regime principle of democracy into different variants, namely, representative v. direct, Westminster v. consensus, and parliamentary v. presidential democracy (Lijphart 1999). These ideal–typical classifications of democratic government arrangements, which exist in a more or less pure form in reality, are often used to characterize the four political systems examined here (for instance, Switzerland is often labelled a ‘direct democracy’, although it would be more correct to describe it as a semi-direct democracy with representative elements). Institutional variants like these give body to the principle of democracy and shape its interpretation in such a way that it is often impossible to distinguish evaluations of particular types of democracy from assessments of the principle of democracy itself. For instance, it is difficult to conceive of a delegitimation of direct democracy in Switzerland or of presidential democracy in the United States that would leave the basic principle of democracy in these countries untouched. (2) Political community or system as a whole: This category of legitimation objects comprises references to specific national incarnations of such regime principles (for instance, the political system of Switzerland, Germany, Britain, or the United States), or to the related ‘demos’, without (explicitly) assessing the principles themselves (these




83

systems or communities may be referred to by their proper name – ‘the United States’, ‘America[ns]’, and so on – or by generic expressions like ‘our form of government’ and ‘our nation’, without further specifications). Even if the delegitimation of a whole real-world political system or community ‘as such’ need not affect its regime principles, it would also indicate a pervasive legitimacy crisis, since it would touch upon the most basic and most general parameters through which sovereignty, constitutionalism, democracy, and welfare provision are institutionalized. (3) Core political institutions: This category refers to the specific institutions of a political system. In particular, we coded references to the form of government (monarchy or republic, a category that only plays a role in the United Kingdom), the three branches of government (executive, legislative, judiciary), the electoral system, and the system of territorial organization (unitary or federal). While these objects are certainly important political institutions, we assume that the delegitimation of any one of them does not necessarily result in a legitimacy crisis of the democratic nation state as a whole. (4) Major groups of actors: While our study does not address the legitimation of specific office holders or politicians, and therefore excludes what Easton calls authorities, we did include evaluations of political actors when these were assessed collectively: the political class or elites, the party system, and the system of interest groups. Such terms refer to political actors but clearly contain a systemic element: while individual politicians and parties can be replaced by ballot (‘throwing the rascals out’), accountability is undermined if all politicians – or all parties and interest groups – are seen as illegitimate. Nevertheless, we consider the delegitimation of these objects to be the least serious: in a democracy, there is always the possibility of electing a different group of politicians, or of forming new parties and interest groups, without fundamentally altering the basic principles, structures, and institutions of the political system. Besides excluding statements on policies and individual actors, our empirical analysis also neglects statements that refer to more peripheral or narrowly circumscribed institutions – for example, individual ministries and bureaucratic agencies, parliamentary committees, and so on. We assume that statements evaluating these and similar objects, even if heavily delegitimating, constitute a form of political criticism that does not cross the threshold beyond which the legitimacy of the political system is brought into question. Clearly, however, generalization processes can take place in these cases as well – for example,




if scandals affecting a parliamentary committee trigger debates over the legitimacy of the political class, the legislative branch, the political system as a whole, and ultimately even the principle of (representative) democracy. The idea of a hierarchy of different legitimation objects implies that the processes of escalation and de-escalation that we discussed above with reference to legitimacy attention cycles not only underpin the emergence and fading of legitimation debates but might also play themselves out between various levels of the object hierarchy. For example, a legitimation debate might originally only concern the party system or a government institution, but then shift upwards in our hierarchy by focusing on the political system as a whole or even core regime principles. Conversely, debates about high-level objects might gradually become more restricted and narrow down to specific institutions. German constitutional reform discourses in the 1990s and early 2000s arguably followed this pattern, starting with debates over – and evaluations of – high-level objects such as consensus and parliamentary democracy, and ending with debates over (technicalities of) federalism. As suggested above, the debates in the aftermath of the November 2000 presidential election in the United States represent another good example, again starting with genuine legitimacy-related communication pitched at the level of American democracy and its core institutions, and ending with discussions related to the minutiae of the electoral system. Objects of legitimation: Concentration and dispersal In addition to the aggregate legitimacy levels discussed above, the frequency with which individual objects of legitimation are assessed positively or negatively in media discourses represents evidence on the existence or non-existence of legitimacy problems or crises. This evidence does not only indicate which specific objects are most affected by legitimacy problems. The concentration of legitimation discourses on one or a few objects – or their fragmentation – also holds implications for the legitimacy of the regime as a whole. Do legitimation discourses focus on a handful of objects, or do they address a wide variety of institutions and regime principles? It is hardly possible to decide a priori whether the concentration of legitimacy evaluations on just a few objects is any ‘better’ or ‘worse’ for the stability of a regime’s legitimacy than a dispersal of references (Table 3.4). Regarding delegitimation, for example, a wide dispersal of statements might be interpreted as a sign that many institutions and




Levels of Legitimacy Objects of legitimation: Concentration and dispersal Legitimation Concentration Focused legitimation (‘anchoring’) Dispersal

Delegitimation Focused delegitimation

Dispersed legitimation Dispersed delegitimation

principles of a given political system suffer from legitimacy problems; on the other hand, especially if legitimacy levels are not extremely low, it could also indicate that the attention of delegitimizers keeps shifting back and forth between different objects, thus preventing sustained attacks on any of them. Conversely, if critics sustain their focus on a specific object, this could mean that the delegitimation remains to some extent contained; on the other hand, especially if an object at the level of regime principles is concerned, this constellation might equally indicate that a core pillar of the democratic nation state is about to crumble. Similar interpretations suggest themselves with respect to legitimating statements. Here a dispersal of statements means that a wide variety of objects enjoy at least a modicum of support, but, on the other hand, concentrated legitimation of a few important objects, most importantly regime principles, could be even more important, since these might function as particularly reliable ‘anchors’ that prevent an all-out erosion of legitimacy. After all, if the legitimacy of principles like democracy or constitutionalism is repeatedly reaffirmed in public communication, it can be taken for granted that, even if all the institutions around them were evaluated negatively, these principles would still constitute pillars on which the legitimacy of the institutional order could be reconstructed. Thus, in the interpretation of the concentration or dispersal of evaluations relating to different objects of legitimation, close attention must be paid both to legitimacy levels and to the specific objects that are addressed. In the light of the above discussion, it is also safe to assume that the frequency distributions of the object variable will depend to some extent on the political events that trigger legitimation debates, which may or may not relate to just one object, and also on the institutional structures of the political system. The concentration or dispersal of political power, for instance, might foster, or be reflected in, a similar concentration or dispersal of the reference objects of legitimation discourses.



Table 3.4

85

86


This and the following section examine the frequency distributions of legitimation objects evaluated, as well as the legitimating or delegitimating thrust of object-specific legitimacy assessments in the national discourses of Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the United States. In a first step, we concentrate on our monitoring of all legitimation statements in 2004. As explained above, this corpus enables us to analyse the short-term dynamics of legitimation debates. In the present context, it is particularly interesting to see whether the objects addressed in these debates are subject to attention cycles similar to those found with regard to the issues that trigger debates. Figure 3.4, which concentrates on those objects that were referred to in at least 5 per cent of all statements in each country, illustrates that this is indeed the case. It further reveals that, even though some objects were consistently more prominent than others, no object monopolized attention throughout the entire year. Instead, the relative importance of different objects shifted from month to month, often reflecting changes in the issues that were the principal triggers of legitimacy-related communication. Phases of legitimation and delegitimation that focused on just one specific object were short, and, as with the issues, we found no evidence of a ‘ratchet effect’ in which debates on one object locked in at a particular level of intensity. Nevertheless, Figure 3.4 already indicates that there are substantial differences between countries when it comes to the frequency of references to different objects in legitimation statements. This is the issue to which we now turn. A glance at the aggregate categories – the different levels of the object hierarchy introduced above – reveals a clear overall dominance of the category ‘political community/system as a whole’ (Table 3.5). As further indicated by Figure 3.5, the political community or system is mainly evaluated negatively in Britain and Germany (where legitimacy levels are almost in the ‘low’ category), while the preponderance of negative evaluations is less extreme in Switzerland (medium). In the United States, positive statements dominate in this category, although the overall legitimacy level is again medium according to our scale. Second in overall importance is the category of regime principles. Most strikingly, these are mainly evaluated positively, at a medium legitimacy level, in all countries except Britain. But even in the United Kingdom regime principles enjoy higher legitimacy than all other classes of objects. By contrast, legitimacy levels for specific political institutions and especially groups of actors are low – or, in one case, at the low end of



Monitoring objects of legitimation (2004)

Dem. State Interv. State

30

Pol. Comm. Pol. Class

20 10 0 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Dem. State Const. State Pol. Class

Pol. Regime Pol. Comm. Interv. State

50 Number of statements

Pol. Regime Const. State Leg. Branch

40 30 20 10 0 1

Month

2

3

4

5

United states Pol. Regime Const. State

120

Dem. State Elect. System

Pol. Comm.

Pol. Regime Pol. Comm. Direct dem. Cons. Dem.

40 Number of statements

100 80 60 40 20 0 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Month

Figure 3.4

6 7 8 Month Switzerland

9

10

11

12

10

11

12

Dem. State Interv. State Exec. Branch Terr. Org.

30 20 10 0 1

2

3

4

5

6 7 Month

8

9

Legitimacy attention cycles by country and object (2004) 10.1057/9780230275331 - Democracy's Deep Roots, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner


Germany

Great Britain 40

88


20 10

−10

I II

−20

III IV

−30 −40 CH

−50 Figure 3.5

DE

GB

US

Legitimating or delegitimating tendency by object category (2004)

Note: Values were calculated by subtracting the percentage of de-legitimating statements in each object category from 50.0 per cent.

Table 3.5 Legitimation statements by country and object category (2004, %) Object category

CH

DE

Regime principles Political community, system as a whole Political institutions Groups of actors

37.2 38.7

34.7 41.2

14.7 9.4

14.7 9.5

Total (n)

100.0 (776)

100.0 (1,212)

GB

US

Overall

27.8 37.3

16.9 64.3

28.3 47.3

24.7 10.2

13.6 5.2

16.1 8.3

100.0 (697)

100.0 (1,239)

100.0 (3,924)

the medium category – in all four countries. These figures suggest that the principles on which political systems are based continue to enjoy stable legitimacy in at least three of our four countries, whereas delegitimating statements are mainly addressed towards lower-level objects which are of lesser importance for the survival of democratic regimes. However, in order to ascertain which specific principles are most important in each of the four countries, and which specific institutions or groups of actors contribute most strongly to the delegitimating tendencies affecting the two corresponding aggregate categories, we have to take a disaggregated look at legitimation objects (Table 3.6). In terms of regime principles, this analysis reveals that different principles are dominant in each of the four countries. With the sole exception



0


89

Table 3.6 Objects of legitimation evaluated in at least five per cent of statements by country (2004)

CH Political system Democracy Political community Federalism Welfare state

Total (n)

DE

30.7 23.8

43.7 60.0

8.0

40.3

7.0 6.4

(100.0) (776)

Political system Political community Democracy

26.2 14.9

34.0 38.1

11.9

64.6

46.3 26.0

Constitutionalism Federalism Welfare state Political class

11.1 9.6 9.2 7.0

78.5 23.3 25.9 5.9

43.0

Total (n)

GB Political system Democracy Political community Political class Constitutionalism Welfare state Legislature Judiciary Total (n)

(100.0) (1,212)

40.9

US

27.8 10.0 9.5

29.9 38.6 51.5

8.5 8.3 7.5 5.3 5.2

10.2 32.8 36.5 32.4 44.4

(100.0) (697)

Legitimating Statements (% of object (%) category)

33.0

Political system Democracy Political community Constitutionalism Electoral system

Total (n)

55.9 10.7 8.4

60.2 52.3 51.9

5.4 5.3

61.2 19.7

(100.0) (1,239)

52.0

of Britain, there is at least one regime principle in each country that is both referred to quite frequently in legitimation debates and generally evaluated positively, so that we can speak of a legitimacy anchor. As the four regime principles of the modern democratic nation state have to be seen as a synergetic constellation, we can assume that the positive evaluation of these anchor objects in turn has a positive effect on the legitimacy of the synergetic constellation as a whole and thus contributes to preventing a legitimacy crisis. It is clear from Table 3.6 that in Switzerland the principle of democracy – or more precisely, the democratic nation state in general along with consensus democracy and especially direct democracy as its specific forms of institutionalization – constitutes the most important anchor object. This became most evident in the legitimation debate surrounding the popular rejection, in the referendum of 16 May 2004, of



Object

Legitimating Statements (% of object (%) category) Object

proposed reforms to old age security and widows’ insurance (Alters- und Hinterlassenenversicherung), and of a package of changes to the tax system. In response to this referendum, some circles demanded a cutback of direct democratic rights, arguing that they made political reforms largely impossible. Their proposals, however, met with widespread criticism, as supporters of direct democracy pointed out that reform blockades were not to be attributed to the principle of direct democracy but rather to uncompromising political parties and elites: Thus direct democracy does not prevent reforms but it usually prevents demonstrations of power. That is not a bad thing. ... The participation of the people strengthens reform initiatives, since it ensures that they are firmly grounded. (Tagesanzeiger, 18 May 2004)5 In addition, we also find a large number of ritualized defences of direct democracy, unrelated to any particular controversy, which praise it not only as the best form of democracy in general but also as a core element of Swiss political culture and identity. In Germany, it is the principle of constitutionalism, institutionalized through the German constitution (Grundgesetz, Basic Law), which enjoys the highest legitimacy. The following quote represents a typical example of positive statements on German constitutionalism: This is the sore but crucial point: The Basic Law has an enlightened, secular character. It thus takes sides, also against religions that do not view human beings as individuals but as part of a missionary whole or a history of salvation directed against the followers of other creeds. ... Germany does not need a new leading culture. It already has one: the culture of the Basic Law. There is none better. (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 November 2004)6 The Basic Law is extolled here as a political symbol of the principles of enlightenment. A number of further examples in our text corpus likewise demonstrate that constitutionalism plays a key role in the legitimation of Germany’s political arrangements, so that one could indeed speak of the constitution as the anchor of the political system as a whole, contributing greatly to the stability of its legitimacy. The United States, the country with the highest overall legitimacy level in our sample, also possesses characteristic legitimacy anchors: the principles of democracy and constitutionalism. By contrast, such anchors seem to be lacking in Great Britain. On the basis of the country’s




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institutional traditions and political culture, one might have expected parliamentary democracy – and the House of Commons – to play a comparable role. But at least in the year 2004, with its generally critical legitimation debates, all core principles of the British state were mostly delegitimated. The British legitimation debates in 2004 are therefore not only those with the lowest overall legitimacy levels but also those in which delegitimation most clearly affected the pillars of the democratic regime. One last finding that is important with respect to regime principles is that the welfare state is mainly delegitimated in all four countries. In Switzerland, Germany, and Britain, most of these negative evaluations occurred in the context of reform debates and reflected the difficulty of establishing political consensus on the welfare state’s future shape. Thus, while hardly anyone in these debates denied that the state should have some kind of welfare component, it became evident that the interpretation and operationalization of the principle of social security are no longer uncontested in these three countries. By contrast, very few statements in the United States focused on this aspect of the state at all, which might be due to the general marginality of the American welfare state compared with its European counterparts (and also to the marginality of the very term ‘welfare state’ in political debates). Turning to the next level in the hierarchy of legitimation objects, the political community or system as a whole, we find that the legitimacy levels of these objects are very similar, and – unsurprisingly – close to the overall average, in almost all cases. Two findings, however, are noteworthy. First, the dominance of the regime category is particularly intense for the United States, where more than half of all statements refer to the political system as a whole. This might be due to the role of the US as a superpower in international affairs, which fosters references to the American political system as a unitary actor in foreign policy or international politics contexts; these propositions in turn are usually affirmative: ‘[T]he United States has become the greatest of all great powers in world history’ (New York Times, 13 January 2004) – ‘[O]ur nation was forged in battle and ... our freedom has been secured by sacrifice’ (Washington Post, 27 May 2004). Even in other contexts, sweeping affirmations of the principles and legitimacy of the American political system abound to an extent unparalleled in the other three national discourses. The second interesting finding concerns Great Britain, where there is a remarkable divergence between evaluations of the political system and the political community. Whereas the former’s legitimacy is even





lower than the average for all objects, the political community is the only important legitimation object that is evaluated positively more often than negatively. Most of these positive evaluations refer – in a rather ritualistic fashion – to the (allegedly) exceptional qualities of the British people. With some caution, we might conclude that, in the face of widespread delegitimation of British political institutions, the political community plays the role of a legitimacy anchor in British legitimation discourses: Because our history has made us remarkably outward-looking and open, this country has fostered a vigorously adaptable society and has given rise to a culture both creative and inventive. But an open and adapting society also needs to be rooted, and Britain’s roots are on the most solid foundation of all – a passion for liberty anchored in a sense of duty and an intrinsic commitment to tolerance and fair play. (Gordon Brown, quoted in: Guardian, 8 July 2004) Which values did Bernard Howard [Conservative Party leader Michael Howard’s father] particularly appreciate? ‘The tolerance, the fairness, the anger at injustice, the great sense of moderation which is, I think, one of the characteristics of the British people – all those things that sometimes we take for granted.’ (Michael Howard, quoted in Times ,2 January 2004) The level of core political institutions is not particularly prominent in the legitimation discourses of any country. Which institutions are referred to most often closely corresponds to the political issues around which legitimation debates unfold. For example, debates in Germany and Switzerland concentrated on the system of territorial organization, as the federal arrangements of both countries were often blamed for political deadlock as well as for a lack of transparency and accountability. On the other hand, at least in Switzerland, federal institutions were also defended as a core element of the country’s political identity. Unsurprisingly, too, the election in the United States triggered a number of statements on the electoral system, whereas many debates in Britain concerned the legislature’s ability to control an ever stronger government. Finally, regarding major groups of actors, the political class belongs to the most important legitimation objects in the United States and Germany. In both countries, its legitimacy levels are exceptionally low. All in all, the analysis of disaggregated legitimation objects thus confirms that legitimacy anchors are mainly to be found at the level



92

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of regime principles, while lower-level objects are generally evaluated more critically. With the partial exception of Great Britain, where only the political community is exempt from a general delegitimation trend, we therefore find that the legitimation objects that are least affected by legitimacy problems tend to be those with the greatest importance for democratic regimes. This is reassuring news for anyone worrying about an imminent legitimacy crisis of the democratic nation state: even in cases in which assessments of politics are generalized beyond individual policies or political actors (that is, even if a genuine legitimation statement is formulated), many of the most critical evaluations are still directed at relatively peripheral objects. These serve as a kind of cushion, absorbing a fair amount of criticism in the mass-media and preventing it from hurting core regime principles. Furthermore, and perhaps unsurprisingly, especially those principles that are generally considered to be of special importance for the regime in question – such as constitutionalism in the United States and Germany, and direct democracy in Switzerland – tend to enjoy the greatest legitimacy. Apparently, they are so deeply entrenched in national political cultures that it is exceptionally difficult to undermine their legitimacy. Examination of the various legitimation objects also enables us to categorize the four national discourses with regard to their greater or lesser concentration on specific objects. Figure 3.6 shows the results of this analysis, in which we draw on a measure of ‘effective numbers’ frequently used in the study of party systems. The most notable result is the exceptionally high concentration of the US legitimation discourse, which is due mainly to the great importance of the categories ‘political community’, ‘political system’, and ‘democracy’, especially in positively legitimating statements. In delegitimating statements, the dispersal – which one might have expected in light of the multi-actor character of the American polity – is somewhat more pronounced, since many of these also focus on specific political institutions, such as the electoral system. All other countries – and even Britain as a single-actor system – display a greater fragmentation, that is, a more pronounced dispersal among the various objects. Switzerland is the only other country, apart from the United States, for which we find pronounced concentration on the legitimating side. This is due to the unusually important role of the object of democracy (the principle of democracy as such along with its more specific – direct and consensual – forms of institutionalization) for the legitimation of the Swiss political system. These results provide some evidence on the specific legitimation styles of the four countries (Table 3.7). Both legitimating and delegitimating




94 Democracy’s Deep Roots 9 8 7

Legitimation

5

Delegitimation

4

Overall 3 2 1 0 CH

DE

GB

US

Figure 3.6 Concentration and dispersal of legitimation discourses (‘effective number’ of legitimation objects, 2004) Note: The ‘effective number of parties’ (Lijphart 1999, 66) – or in our case, of legitimation objects (LO) – is the inverse of the Herfindahl-Hirschman index of concentration, and hence calculated as 1/S LOi2. As objects with high percentage shares are weighted more strongly than objects with low shares, the resulting figures indicate the ‘effective’ number of those objects that play more than a marginal role in each of the four discourses, and in the coalitions of (de)legitimizers. The measure ranges from a minimum of 1 (full concentration on a single object) to a maximum corresponding to the number of percentage shares on which it is based (15 in our case, which would indicate an equal distribution of the various legitimation objects).

Table 3.7 (2004)

Legitimation styles: Concentration on objects of legitimation

Legitimation

Delegitimation

Concentration

Focused legitimation: CH, US

Focused delegitimation: US

Dispersal

Dispersed legitimation: DE, GB

Dispersed delegitimation: CH, DE, GB

political communication in the United States, for example, are characterized by a remarkable concentration on a few objects, most importantly the political community, the political system, and democracy, so that we can talk of a ‘focused’ form of both legitimation and delegitimation.



6

By contrast, legitimation and delegitimation in the United Kingdom and Germany are dispersed: different objects of legitimation at all levels of our hierarchy play a role in these two legitimation discourses. Reliable legitimacy anchors are either lacking or relatively weak: in Germany, for example, the principle of constitutionalism, though clearly connected to positive evaluations, is not nearly as dominant as the principle of democracy in the United States or Switzerland. Finally, the Swiss legitimation discourse is characterized by an interesting bifurcation between legitimating and delegitimating communication: while delegitimating statements are dispersed over a large variety of objects, legitimating statements focus to a considerable extent on a particular legitimacy anchor, namely (direct) democracy. We may thus speak of dispersed delegitimation coupled with focused legitimation. To sum up, the monitoring of legitimation statements in 2004 allows three important conclusions. First, the varying importance of different legitimation objects over time confirms that legitimation discourses are influenced by two factors. On one hand, the characteristics of different political systems play a role, but on the other, the frequency of references to specific objects is also subject to attention cycles corresponding to the political events of the day. In Switzerland, for example, the frequent and consistent references to (direct) democracy can be attributed to system characteristics, whereas references to the welfare state or the criticism levelled against the executive coincided, rather, with specific events, such as the failed referendum on the reform of the old age security system. Secondly, with the exception of Great Britain, we find that specific regime principles such as democracy and constitutionalism tend to be evaluated positively at a rate clearly above average, and hence operate as legitimacy anchors for the political systems as a whole. Furthermore, in all countries, objects that are generally assumed to be of special importance for the regime in question tend to enjoy greater legitimacy than more marginal objects. Thirdly, not only the specific legitimacy anchors (democracy and constitutionalism in the United States, constitutionalism in Germany, democracy in Switzerland, and possibly the political community in Britain) but also the patterns of concentration and dispersal of references to different legitimation objects generate some first insights into the specific legitimation styles of different countries. In this respect, the United States is characterized by focused legitimation and delegitimation, Britain and Germany have considerably more fragmented discourses, and Switzerland combines dispersed delegitimation with focused legitimation.




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Our case studies of legitimation debates surrounding particularly contentious issues enable us to verify whether these findings indicate stable features of national legitimation discourses. As explained above, a key question raised in these case studies is the extent to which policy debates actually evolved into legitimation debates. The concept of legitimation objects is of central importance for answering this question, since we speak of legitimation debates precisely when one of these objects – which refer to a political system’s core institutions and principles rather than to more marginal institutions related to specific policies – is addressed. Evidently, which legitimation objects are referred to most often is to some extent influenced by the policy context from which a legitimation debate arises. For instance, it is reasonable to expect that debates about social policy focus on the welfare state, and debates about institutional reform on the specific institution whose overhaul is being discussed. The case studies enable us to assess to what extent legitimation debates actually remain restricted to these ‘obvious’ objects, or whether they are expanded to encompass other institutions as well. The case studies on institutional reforms yield mixed evidence in this respect. In Great Britain, we examined debates about constitutional reform which actually touched upon a large variety of issues, among them the devolution of powers to Scotland and Wales, a reform of the House of Lords, changes to the electoral system, and the codification of Britain’s ‘unwritten’ constitution. In these debates, both more specific objects – the system of territorial organization, the legislature, and the electoral system – and more general objects such as the constitution or the principle of constitutionalism as a whole were addressed. Interestingly, while the more specific objects were generally delegitimated, most evaluations of the constitution turned out positive. While we could not find any legitimacy anchor at the level of regime principles in the British legitimation debates of 2004, the constitution seems to have played this role in the periods examined in our case studies (1992 and 1997). The American debates on institutional reforms remained very much centred on the electoral system, focusing on term limits for legislators in 1992 and on various aspects of the scandalous presidential election in 2000. Interestingly, while debates in the second time period unfolded against the backdrop of a genuine political crisis and also were clearly more intense, they gave rise to a lower amount of generalization beyond the ‘obvious’ legitimation objects. While many proponents of term limits in 1992 portrayed these as a solution to more encompassing



Objects of legitimation in a policy context (1990–2004)

problems of the political order per se, debates in 2000 and 2001 focused mainly on the electoral system and eventually, as the election turned into a court battle, on the judicial branch of government. Higher-level objects in our hierarchy – such as the political system as a whole or regime principles such as democracy – were involved to a surprisingly small extent. In Germany and Switzerland, our case studies focused on constitutional reform. In both instances, the first reform (or reform attempt) was more encompassing while the second concerned just one specific element of the constitution. This is also reflected in the legitimation objects addressed. German debates in 1994 were about the need to devise a new constitution for the reunified country, an issue that was bound to trigger communication on basic principles of democracy and constitutionalism. By contrast, debates in 2004 concerned reforms of the federal system, and the main legitimation object addressed was the obvious one: the system of territorial organization. The same is true for Switzerland, where a large-scale reform of direct democracy failed in 1999, while more moderate reforms were agreed upon in 2003. Not surprisingly, debates in 1999 not only were more intense but also focused on higher-level objects. In the field of social policy, all case studies point to an increasing tendency of legitimation debates to extend beyond the ‘obvious’ objects, albeit at low intensity levels. In the British debates about health reform, most legitimation statements in 1992 concerned the NHS as a core institution of the British welfare state, while debates in 2001 were more likely to focus on objects like the political system, the executive branch, or the political class as scapegoats for the repeated failure of NHS reform. In the United States and Germany, we observe similar tendencies to blame the political system, core political institutions, or the political class for what was perceived as a gridlock with respect to welfare state reform. In Switzerland, a comparable picture emerges: fuelled by the third negative referendum on pension reform in a row, the debate largely shifted away from the ‘obvious’ object (the welfare state itself) and, instead, focused on the performance of the political class. In contrast to the delegitimation of politicians, the people and the principle of direct democracy were mainly evaluated positively. In a sense, the legitimation debate changed from a policy-centred debate to a politics-centred debate related to alleged weaknesses of the decision-making processes in the Swiss system of direct democracy and assigning blame for these shortcomings. Finally, the case studies on foreign policy show that this field seems to have an inherent tendency to direct debates towards high-level objects




of legitimation. Apparently, the interaction between states and national governments prompts comparisons of political systems and their core principles in legitimation debates. In the US debates on the Iraq Wars, for instance, contentious procedural issues related to the right to declare war gave way to debates over the legitimacy of the political system and community as a whole, and over the principles of democracy and constitutionalism that ostensibly had to be defended by military means. German debates about Iraq were markedly different, since they were mainly directed inwards and reflected upon the lessons to be drawn from Germany’s gruesome past for the country’s contribution to military interventions. Nevertheless, the objects addressed – most importantly, the political community – were also high-level in character. Interactions with the European Union, which we examined in Great Britain and Switzerland, also foster debates about the core principles of the respective political systems. In Britain, the principles of state sovereignty and democracy were often legitimated in the face of an alleged threat of European integration, and the political system or community was evaluated positively in comparison with Europe. In Switzerland, where the issue of the country’s EU membership proved very controversial over a number of years, the one thing that both sides to the debate agreed upon was the overarching importance – and unquestionable legitimacy – of the principle of direct democracy. We may conclude that different issues seem to be connected to different dynamics when it comes to the legitimation objects that are most likely to be addressed. As discussed above, a first question concerns the likelihood of policy debates triggering debates about one of our legitimation objects at all. In this respect, debates on social policy display the greatest tendency to remain at a policy level. As soon as the level of legitimation debates is reached, a second question arises: does the debate stick to legitimation objects closely connected to the policy issue that originally triggered it, or does it move beyond these ‘obvious’ issues? It can be assumed that debates which stick to policy-related legitimation objects are less likely to have any long-term influence on the political system’s legitimacy, since these debates are more likely to subside once policy debates come to an end. In our case studies, debates on institutional reforms betrayed a surprisingly small tendency to be generalized in such a way, while debates on foreign policy regularly engaged the political community and system, as well as core regime principles, right from the beginning. By contrast, debates on social policy were focused on specific legitimation objects to a much greater extent, although some tendency towards increased generalization can




be discerned in all countries (and the welfare state itself, of course, belongs to the regime principles of the democratic nation state). This finding again suggests that issues of social policy might have the potential to trigger serious legitimacy problems in the future, but for the time being it has to be borne in mind that the overwhelming majority of social policy debates do not concern issues of legitimacy at all.

Summary The empirical analysis in this chapter casts doubt on the prevalent ‘erosion of legitimacy’ hypothesis: it shows that, with the partial exception of Great Britain, none of the four examined countries is faced with an overwhelming delegitimation of its core political institutions and principles. Delegitimation does not seem to zero in on specific institutions: rather, attention cycles result in attention shifting from one object to another. What is more, those political institutions that are delegitimated at unusually high rates tend to be relatively marginal, while core regime principles of the democratic nation state tend to function as legitimacy anchors that enjoy particularly high acceptance rates. This suggests that the basic institutions and principles of the examined political systems are so deeply entrenched in political cultures that it is difficult to undermine their legitimacy in a blanket fashion. In terms of developments over time, our case studies do not indicate any trend of intensifying legitimation debates or eroding legitimacy. We argue, therefore, that a type I or II legitimacy crisis does not exist in the examined countries. It remains to be asked, however, whether there is any evidence for a legitimacy crisis of type III – the gradual displacement of democratic by non-democratic bases of legitimacy. To answer this question, the next chapter will focus on legitimation patterns.




How Democratic is the Legitimacy of the Nation State?

Our first foray into the empirical material, as presented in Chapter 3, has yielded few, if any, unequivocal indications for a legitimacy crisis in the public spheres of the four countries examined. Contrary to the claims advanced by much of the recent literature on globalization and its impact on the democratic nation state, we found little evidence for substantial scepticism towards these political systems and their basic structures or norms. So far, however, our argumentation has been centred on one specific understanding of legitimacy crises, namely, that such crises unfold, or must be diagnosed, if the volume and share of delegitimating communication increases beyond a given threshold. Where delegitimating evaluations of political systems and their institutional foundations come to prevail – and not just temporarily – we speak of an erosion or collapse of democratic legitimacy, that is, of type I or II legitimacy crises. The reference category of our typology is represented by the notion of secure democratic legitimacy – a state in which key legitimation objects, not least the political community and system as a whole, tend to be assessed positively, on the basis of democratic criteria of legitimation. But what about our third scenario, in which affirmative evaluations of democratic systems continue to prevail, albeit on the basis of the ‘wrong’ – that is, non-democratic – normative criteria? We have already introduced the term ‘non-democratic patterns of legitimation’ to denote such evaluation standards, and to underline that there are a number of potentially relevant standards that are not essential components of democratic modes of legitimation. Where positive assessments of democratic systems remain dominant but are increasingly grounded in non-democratic criteria, we might equally diagnose a legitimacy crisis – a crisis of democratic legitimation standards and self-conceptions, that is, a transformation of democratic legitimacy. 100 10.1057/9780230275331 - Democracy's Deep Roots, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner


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Yet the identification of such type III crises is premised on a clear distinction between democratic and non-democratic evaluation criteria. Thus we cannot restrict our analysis to distinguishing between affirmative and critical propositions and gauging their relative weight in legitimation discourses. The nature of the standards used in expressions of support for, or dissent with, a regime is just as important, given that our distinction of type I v. type II and III crises hinges upon it. In order to gain a better understanding of (de)legitimation processes, to distinguish the type I scenario from the more severe type II, and to examine whether there are indications for type III crises in our sample of four Western democracies, we therefore have to turn to the third key element of our legitimation grammar, namely, patterns of legitimation. A closer examination of legitimation patterns is also required to allow a more fine-grained analysis of shifts in the nature and distribution of legitimating and delegitimating arguments that might occur below the threshold of a visible crisis. Even though our findings so far suggest that legitimacy crises of type I or II – which are nurtured and accompanied by intense delegitimation – have not unfolded in the public spheres of our four countries, there might nevertheless be tendencies in that direction, and these might jeopardize legitimacy and develop crisis proportions in the long run. The analysis of legitimation patterns should help us gauge such ‘legitimation risks’. What patterns are linked with tendencies and challenges of this sort? Do evaluations of democracies and their institutional foundations tend to draw on democratic patterns (as in the type I scenario) or on non-democratic patterns (as in the full-blown crisis scenario represented by type II and the type III scenario that will be the focus of this chapter)? The kinds of patterns used are related to the kinds of risks to which democratic systems might be exposed. Which evaluation standards can be identified in the first place, though? How might the patterns that occur in public discourses be classified systematically? Can subgroups of patterns be distinguished in such a typology? How should the crucial distinction between democratic and non-democratic criteria be operationalized? And are there further meaningful categories? Extant political science literature offers few answers to these questions. So far, neither the positive nor the normative strand of legitimacy research has developed sufficiently broad, analytically sustainable catalogues of empirically relevant or theoretically conceivable legitimation patterns. In fact, a key finding of our search for these patterns in the mediated legitimation discourses of four Western democracies is precisely that



Foundations of Legitimacy


the number of relevant – that is, frequently used – normative standards is unexpectedly high. No contribution to the extant literature appears to hypothesize such a variety of relevant criteria, to offer adequate guidelines for their interpretation, or to locate them in a typology. Most theories work with one, two or three legitimation patterns and ignore the possibility that far more criteria might play a role. Empirical legitimacy research must therefore break free from the history-of-ideas tradition and from the kinds of legal and political science theories that have hitherto dominated the field if it is to do justice to the profusion of criteria and arguments used in (positive or negative) real-world evaluations of political orders and institutions. At the same time, however, it has to build on inspirations from these literatures to develop a viable and meaningful classification of legitimation patterns. In a first step, therefore, we shall explore the potential of extant theories and legitimacy research for the study and classification of legitimation patterns. The typology that we will use for the empirical analysis of our textual data is based on a synopsis of legitimation patterns highlighted by several important theories and has been complemented with additional patterns yielded by the examination of our own material. No fewer than twenty-three patterns are thus categorized into four subgroups based on the distinctions between input and output legitimacy, and between democratic and non-democratic criteria. In a second step, we probe the monitoring and case-study data for indications of the type III crisis scenario, that is, the affirmation of democracies and their institutions on the basis of non-democratic criteria. This is followed by a detailed examination of legitimation patterns used in public communication, in which we attempt to identify any tendencies that might jeopardize legitimacy in one or more of the four cases. Are there specific legitimation risks below the crisis threshold? Finally, a closer look at the case studies enables us to identify characteristic legitimation styles and shifts in the use of legitimation patterns. We thereby establish that performance-related criticism of political orders and institutions dominates in some countries while democratic standards are upheld in others, with criticism focusing on a lack of respect for these standards on the part of authorities.

Towards a typology of legitimation patterns Genuinely empirical research into legitimation patterns remains a desideratum. This state of affairs is not only due to the dominance of Max Weber’s threefold distinction of traditional, charismatic, and



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legal–rational authority, which may have impeded the search for other beliefs in which legitimacy could be grounded. Almost equally important is the dominance of the normatively oriented (‘diagnostic’) approach to legitimacy questions, which tackles empirical reality in a selective fashion, guided by one or another theory of democracy and legitimacy. Such research focuses on the degree to which key normative criteria of legitimacy are met by real-world political orders, or on the extent to which they underpin public opinion and occur in the public sphere. In the following, we do not intend to break away completely from these traditions. Weber’s conception remains, in our view, a major starting point for research into the foundations of empirical legitimacy. Moreover, we aim to shed light on the scope and nature of democratic legitimation in our four countries, and for this reason also we have not chosen a normatively neutral starting point for our analysis. However, our goal is to replace the highly selective approaches to legitimacy that characterize both traditions with a much more open perspective – one that is closer to real-world legitimation processes. In this perspective, the history of legitimacy concepts in normative political theory and legal scholarship, as well as the history of empirically oriented political science, may be interpreted as a process in which the space of potentially relevant legitimation standards has been increasingly opened and broadened over time. The origins of the modern term ‘legitimacy’ are linked with the conflicts surrounding the restoration of the French monarchy in the wake of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. Legitimacy was a highly politicized, partisan concept directed against every form of republican government. Talleyrand employed it at the Vienna Congress for the strategic foreign policy objective of rehabilitating France, and, domestically, to secure the rule of the Bourbon dynasty. Legitimacy, in other words, was a politically closed term that helped justify the restoration of the monarchy without the need to revert to increasingly derelict notions of divine right. For half a century, then, the term was firmly anchored in the restoration camp. It took a while before the meaning of legitimacy was expanded, its reductionist linkage with monarchical government and the right of specific dynasties to rule was renounced, and the term came to signify the acceptability of political rule in general. This development implied the emergence of new kinds of justification – that is, new legitimation patterns – for political orders and the authority of rulers. Throughout the nineteenth century, two principles of legitimacy confronted each





other, one linked to the notion of popular sovereignty and one related to monarchical sovereignty. While this front line characterized political conflicts up until the First World War, it does not fully cover the spectrum of concepts advocated in political theory and the public sphere. Legitimacy concepts associated with notions of reason and justice could also be found alongside concepts that reverted to the idea of a divine order as a source of legitimate political authority (Würtenberger 1982). While reasoned argument and divine justification were no more than variations on the theme of either popular or monarchical sovereignty being the key foundation of legitimacy, a third school of thought that managed to assert itself as a prominent voice in the legitimation debates of the nineteenth century has to be mentioned. Distancing itself from the notions of democratic and monarchical legitimacy, this school propagated legality as a form of legitimacy based on the rule of law. Debates on legality versus legitimacy were notably pursued by German theorists of state law and had their heyday in the 1920s and early 1930s. Thus a threefold constellation – with monarchical, popular, and legal sovereignty as alternative foundations of legitimacy – developed in parallel with the political forces of the time. As we have seen, each of these conceptions was grounded in the notion of sovereignty. The same holds true for legal positivism, which had characterized German legal and constitutional theory since the end of the nineteenth century. With the concept of state sovereignty, it did not develop a genuine alternative to the confrontation between dynasties and the people as sources of legitimacy, but rather perpetuated, more or less directly, the traditional association of legitimacy with monarchical sovereignty, a concept that was now linked with the state and relegated the people, as represented by parliaments, beyond the confines of the state (Schönberger 1997). Only the critics of legal positivism and the dominant brand of state theory in the days of the Weimar Republic broke away from the idea that sovereignty is an element of the self-representation of (democratic) political systems (Jestaedt and Lepsius 2006). Yet the idea that legitimacy and sovereignty belong together has never been abandoned completely. It owes its tenacity to the notion that legitimacy can ultimately only be rooted in the volition of some individual or group, such as the will of the people. If this particular authority does not assert itself as the sovereign anchor of a political system but has to share power with other forces, then the regime as a whole cannot be legitimate, because it is also influenced by less legitimate actors. Hence ultimate legitimacy and supreme power have to coincide for the regime



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to be acceptable. This legal tradition is embedded in notions such as ‘source of legitimation’ or ‘chain of legitimation’, according to which legitimacy is grounded in a supreme volition and derived from a single principle. Legitimation through the people, the throne, the law, or the state is either secure or not. Each of these principles may be contested on the basis of a competing principle, but such debates nevertheless circle around the validity of individual principles. A political system is, in other words, not legitimated by living up to some combination of evaluative criteria. While the metaphor of legitimation sources derives from this claim of a single foundation of legitimacy, the chain metaphor establishes the link between this source and specific institutions. Like the ‘great chain of being’ (Lovejoy 1982), the chain of legitimation helps construct a relationship between the elements of a political system and the monopolistic source of its overall acceptability.1 Political institutions whose origins cannot be charted back to the source of legitimacy via an uninterrupted chain of legitimation suffer from a ‘legitimacy deficit’. This shift to the notion of deficit, and hence to an economic or fiscal metaphor, implies that political institutions are dependent on an adequate ‘supply’ of legitimacy. In this line of reasoning, the supply can only be ensured via the source. The source, chain, deficit, and supply metaphors are, therefore, elements of a language of legitimation that posits one core legitimation principle and pursues questions of legitimacy according to a deductive logic that must not be confounded with genuinely empirical research into the foundations of legitimacy. Likewise, in a normative legal perspective, discussions on legitimacy revolve around the question of whether the activities of institutions ultimately derive their legitimacy from the people. The legal assessment of institutions is assumed to permit an objective gauging of the existence of a legitimacy deficit, as an uninterrupted chain of legitimation is all that is supposed to matter. Institution-specific evaluations, or the grounding of an institution’s legitimacy in a variety of different evaluative criteria, do not play a role in this tradition. Instead, debates are characterized by a rivalry between alternative principles of legitimation, each of which is understood as absolute by its proponents. This tradition also underpins many comparisons of political systems. The foundations of the legitimacy of different systems are here assumed to be linked with specific types of sovereignty. Thus the British system is associated with the principle of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ first defined by A. V. Dicey (1997 [1885]), while the German one is said to represent ‘constitutional sovereignty’, the Swiss system is





characterized by popular sovereignty in the form of direct democracy, and the American one by the ‘sanctity’ of a constitution that is in turn embedded in a specific democratic tradition (Ackerman 1991; Preuß 1994; Abromeit 1995; Vorländer 2002). In methodological terms, all these theories of legitimation are situated between constitutional dogmatics and the interpretation of core political ideas embedded in constitutional orders. These kinds of analysis do not represent a genuinely empirical approach to the phenomenon of legitimacy, and the idea of a multitude of empirically relevant legitimation patterns has no place in this type of research. Types of legitimacy: Weber, Easton, and public opinion research A more strictly empirical strand of legitimacy research goes back to the writings of Max Weber (1978; see also Bensman 1979). Weber transformed the legal discussion into a sociological analysis of types of authority characterized by the dominant legitimacy beliefs of their respective administrative elites. In his classic threefold typology of traditional, charismatic, and legal–rational authority, the democratic type of authority is conspicuous by its absence or its misplaced subordination under the charismatic type of legitimacy. It was not until the early 1960s that empirical research progressed beyond Weber’s institutional analysis of authority types and government, with its somewhat unsubstantiated claims about the legitimacy beliefs of administrative elites, and took up the issue of legitimacy. Almond and Verba’s (1963, 1980) path-breaking studies of political culture laid the ground for public opinion research, and important categorical differentiations were proposed by David Easton (1965). Current survey-based legitimacy research combines the two strands. Easton’s treatment of Weber has guided research and even inspired the question items that continue to be used in opinion polls on the legitimacy and acceptance of political systems. Very few adaptations or changes to Easton’s framework have been made in this type of research (Westle 2007). In A Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965), Easton introduced the concept of legitimacy as a particular form of diffuse support for authorities and the regime but not the political community. Besides legitimacy, he distinguished other sources of diffuse support, such as ‘belief in the common good’, which is usually referred to as trust and represents a category of support that is also thought to be limited to the authorities and regime. The concept of legitimacy thus played a relatively marginal but highly specific role in Easton’s original analytical framework. This has changed a lot in the wake of his work, however. The concept now tends



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to assume the role of diffuse support in Easton’s own writings. Our study employs a concept of legitimacy that on the one hand occupies a more central position than in his theory but on the other is understood in a more restricted sense. Contrary to Easton’s use of the term, we speak of legitimacy whenever the object assessed in a legitimation statement is related to what Easton calls the regime and the political community. Hence we do not speak of the ‘legitimacy’ of authorities but merely of positive or negative evaluations of the incumbents of government offices or parliamentary mandates. Easton further distinguishes ‘three variable sources of legitimacy – ideological, structural, or personal’ (1965: 287). Although personal legitimacy is quite conspicuously linked – however vaguely – with Weber’s notion of charismatic authority, Easton’s typology does not take up Weber’s directly. There is, for instance, no equivalent to the notion of traditional authority. And the concept of ideological legitimacy – defined as ‘moral convictions about [the] validity of [a] regime’ (Easton 1965: 287) – could just as well serve as a general term for regime legitimacy. In a footnote, Easton discusses Weber’s categories in more detail and criticizes, among other things, the latter’s neglect of forms of justification inspired by the Enlightenment, for instance on the basis of natural law and democratic principles: It is difficult, if not impossible, to fit comfortably into Weber’s scheme, such age old principles of obligation as consent, divine right, social contract, the right of the wise, or the rights of a religious elite. These seem to be largely ignored by Weber and yet they have served as central validating principles in the history of Western political thought. They would fall under my category of ideological legitimating sources. (Easton 1965: 301) Easton overlooks the fact, however, that, where religious movements and sects are concerned, religious forms of justification may be subsumed under Weber’s category of charismatic authority, and where church hierarchies, or ‘hierocracies’ in the Weberian sense, have developed and come to exert authority over believers they may be subsumed under legal–rational authority. In order to capture forms of justification that have developed in the history of political thought, Easton proposes the category of ideological legitimacy, the drawback here, however, being the negative connotation that the term ‘ideology’ used to imply in the 1950s and 1960s, namely, of an emotionally charged body of convictions that may be instrumentalized by political elites.




Weber, by contrast, builds the criticism of ideologies into his very typology. While he does not highlight the forms of argumentation that have played key roles in the history of ideas, he puts the functioning of real-world political orders in the context of charismatic authority – a type of authority that can only manifest itself under ‘exceptional’ circumstances – or in the context of the everyday ideology of routinized forms of bureaucratic authority. Easton’s critique, too, is primarily directed at the particularly controversial type of legal–rational authority. He suggests that this construct is problematic inasmuch as it confounds ideological and structural elements. Easton’s preferred type of structural legitimacy is a more abstract version of Weber’s legal–rational authority. In David Beetham’s contribution to legitimacy research (1991: 15–25), Easton’s structural legitimacy and Weber’s legality are merged in the first of three dimensions of legitimacy. Beetham proposes a universal analytical framework of legitimation rather than different types of legitimacy. The framework comprises, in addition to legality or ‘conformity to rules’, the ‘justifiability of rules in terms of shared beliefs’ (which is analogous to Easton’s ideological legitimacy), and, as a third element, ‘legitimation through expressed consent’. A typological endeavour is primarily made in the second dimension, justifiability. Here Beetham (1991: 69–90) distinguishes justification by reference to an external authority – such as divine command, natural law, or scientific doctrine – from internal justification by reference to tradition or the people. Besides justifications that refer to sources of authority, there is also a justification of the actual content of rules, which may be based either on the differentiation between subjects and rulers or on their unity in the sense of a common interest. In stark contrast to Easton’s approach, which concentrates less on the objects than on the patterns of legitimation, survey research in the wake of his seminal contribution has primarily been preoccupied with the distinction between legitimation objects. Easton’s three types of legitimacy or Beetham’s types have not been pursued further to a significant degree. The focus on efforts to link objects at different levels of generality (political community, regime, authorities) with the distinction between diffuse and specific support, as in Norris (1999b), has been a major factor in the neglect of legitimation patterns as an independent dimension. Little advance has been made, therefore, in developing more fine-grained typologies of patterns (Westle 2007). Types of legitimation patterns may, however, be gleaned not only from the empirical literature but also from normative contributions




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to democratic theory. The realistic strand of democratic theory, in particular, has proposed a number of criteria for the evaluation of democratic systems, some of which, such as accountability, responsiveness, and transparency, are taken from the older literature. This has in turn provoked new efforts to develop more normatively oriented approaches to democratic theory. The emergence and development of communitarian, republican, and deliberative strands of democratic theory in the 1980s and 1990s created an awareness of the variety of legitimation patterns and styles in Western democracies (Schmidt 2008). However, these approaches have not been sufficiently taken up by, and integrated into, public opinion and political culture research. A further expansion of the spectrum of potentially relevant legitimation patterns has been fostered by discussions since the 1990s on the democratic and legitimacy deficit of the EU, of international regimes, and of the political world system of global ‘governance without government’ (Moravcsik 2002, 2005; Clark 2003; Zürn 2005). From a democratic theory perspective, the requisite chain from such arrangements to popular sovereignty as the ultimate source of legitimacy is hard to demonstrate in the absence of major institutional reforms. Hence the status quo – to the extent that it is evaluated positively – has to be justified by reference to other criteria than popular sovereignty. This has fostered the search for alternative sources of legitimacy, and these efforts will also be used here to construct a general typology. As suggested in Chapter 1, they have primarily led to the ‘discovery’ of output criteria such as effectiveness and stability, as opposed to democratic input standards, the fulfilment of which is now presumably threatened at the national level and all but impossible at the level of international organizations and regimes.

Patterns of legitimation: Basic types The upshot of this discussion is that an encompassing synopsis of legitimation patterns has yet to be drawn up. In the following analysis of our textual material, however, we seek to examine the whole spectrum of empirically relevant forms of legitimacy assessments, without theoretically motivated a priori restrictions. Our broad definition of legitimation statements and an encompassing coding scheme, developed in the light of the literature reviewed above and the material itself, enable us to avoid such unwarranted restrictions. Each of the reviewed theoretical contributions mentions no more than a small number of legitimation criteria. If these contributions are collated, however, and





differences clearly identified, we end up with quite an impressive array of potentially relevant legitimation patterns, even taking overlaps into account. Our coding procedure used this extended typology as a starting point, but it also enabled us to take into account unexpected patterns that were identified inductively. The typology established on the basis of the theoretical literature was thus expanded and refined into one containing no fewer than twenty-three specific patterns. Our first observation, therefore, is that public legitimacy communication draws on a wide range of arguments and evaluative criteria rather than on the small number hitherto deemed relevant for Western democracies by legal and political science scholarship. In other words, democracies need to be justified, and justify themselves, against the backdrop of a marked pluralism of criteria. The debates on the legitimacy deficits of the EU and other international regimes alluded to above give a prominent role to the dichotomy of input and output legitimacy. Many observers claim that the foundations of legitimacy in the Western world – with regard to both the nation state and international governance arrangements – have shifted from the input to the output side, resulting in an increasing prominence of criteria such as a regime’s efficiency and effectiveness, or its contribution to stability, as opposed to traditional democratic benchmarks such as popular sovereignty, participation, or accountability. If this hypothesis were correct, we would not necessarily observe a full-blown erosion (or lack) of support for national and international governance arrangements in today’s world, but might rather be faced with a mere transformation of the criteria on which this support is based (Scharpf 1999, 2000; Beck 2005; Mair 2005). Here we draw on extant theoretical arguments to render plausible the classification of the numerous legitimation patterns identified in our material into a few basic categories. The classification of patterns as output-based depends on whether a legitimation object is justified or criticized on the basis of criteria relating to the performance and products, outputs, or outcomes of whole political orders and their core institutions. Hence all those criteria pertaining to the political process itself fall into the category of input legitimacy, including aspects of this process that are sometimes called ‘throughput’. A separate category for throughput legitimacy appeared impracticable for our purposes, given that demarcation between such a category and that of input legitimacy is not always straighforward. However, Scharpf’s version of the dichotomy, formulated in the context of a concept of democratic governance oriented towards problem-solving, suggests that democratic criteria



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underpin input legitimacy, and that output legitimacy, too, is per se a democratic criterion. Both assumptions must be questioned if the distinction between democratic and non-democratic criteria is considered as a separate dimension and combined with the input/output dichotomy. This approach reveals that there are non-democratic input criteria, such as expert or religious authority, and, conversely, democratic output criteria, such as the protection of human rights. To make this two- dimensional classification more plausible, the distinction between democratic and non-democratic criteria needs to be explained further. The identification of conspicuously antidemocratic legitimation patterns such as divine right, expert authority, or a particular social class’s claim to authority is straightforward. But how should we classify patterns like efficiency and effectiveness, or distributive justice? Here we reserve the ‘non- democratic’ category for those evaluation standards that may also be met by political systems without regular and free elections, or without a responsible government. Efficiency or effectiveness, and even distributive justice, may be achieved by dictatorial regimes and, conversely, need not be seen as sine qua non conditions of democratic governance. The category of democratic patterns, on the other hand, comprises more than the standard of popular sovereignty. Building on a realist definition of democracy, we may qualify all those patterns as democratic criteria that represent individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions or elements of democratic governance. The category of democratic output legitimacy is particularly challenging, though. It refers to evaluation standards that assess outputs, but is limited to those outputs that are, at the same time, absolutely essential for the maintenance of democratic procedures and institutions. These are, in other words, inextricably linked with the actual possibility of democratic governance, and hence with the input side of the political process. Empowerment, understood as the provision of basic preconditions for a democratic political process, and the protection of human rights are the two major patterns in this category. These differentiations permit a detailed examination of legitimation practices and their normative foundations in democratic regimes. Table 4.1 summarizes the twentythree legitimation patterns identified in our material and their classification into the four groups of criteria.2 This classification of legitimation patterns also permits the identification of our different types of legitimacy crisis and a more fine-grained examination of subtler legitimation risks. The combination of the input/ output, democratic/non-democratic, and legitimation/delegitimation




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Democratic

Non-democratic

Input

Popular sovereignty – power resides in the people Participation – citizens may actively contribute to decision-making Deliberation – political processes are based on reason(ing) Transparency – political processes are public and accessible Accountability – rulers may be controlled and removed Legality – domestic or international legal rules are respected Credibility – political processes conform to stated objectives, no hidden agenda

Charisma – leadership by a strong personality Expertise – leadership by experts Religion – political processes are grounded in religious authority Tradition – political processes follow traditional rules Moderation – political style is conciliatory

Output

Human rights – individual rights and civil liberties are guaranteed Empowerment – material and cognitive preconditions of citizenship are guaranteed Common good – political results serve the population as a whole, not just privileged elites Reversibility – political results are not irrevocable

Effectiveness and efficiency – common problems are addressed successfully, or solutions are cost-efficient Distributive justice – resources and burdens are distributed equally Stability – political results are durable and lasting Integration – outputs reflect or enhance the polity’s cohesion and identity Morality – outputs conform to moral standards Sovereignty – enhancement of a polity’s autonomy, power, or interest International standing – enhancement of a polity’s status in the world

dichotomies yields eight different scenarios that may be used to refine our two-by-two matrix of crisis scenarios (see Chapter 1). This even more differentiated scheme illustrates that crisis type II – delegitimation on the basis of non-democratic patterns – may amount to one of the two



Table 4.1 Patterns of legitimation: Aggregate and individual categories

following scenarios: a mere performance crisis of democratic regimes, or a genuine democracy crisis in which the conceptualization of democratic legitimacy on the basis of popular sovereignty and related democratic patterns is explicitly, and severely, questioned and rejected in the sphere of public communication. If non-democratic standards are used for mostly positive evaluations, one of the following two versions of a type III crisis may obtain. Where democratic systems are justified in terms of norms that explicitly contradict the principle of popular sovereignty and, instead, highlight other – that is, non- democratic – sources or bearers of sovereignty and authority, we may speak of ‘de-democratization’. Where input criteria are neglected and output benchmarks are predominantly used in an affirmative sense, expressing support for a political system that nevertheless remains democratic, we are faced with the phenomenon of ‘functionalization’, that is, a shift from democratic to a mere functional legitimacy. Table 4.2 summarizes this differentiation and the related threats to democratic legitimacy. Drawing on this comprehensive catalogue of legitimation patterns and the underlying classification scheme, we may now examine the structures and trajectories of legitimation discourses in our four-country Table 4.2 Legitimacy crises and legitimation risks

Delegitimation

Democratic benchmarks

Non-democratic benchmarks

Questioning of a regime’s democratic quality

Democracy crisis: Questioning of a democratic regime and its key normative foundations

Legitimacy crisis I Quality crisis: Questioning of a regime’s liberaldemocratic quality

Legitimacy crisis II Performance crisis: Questioning of a democratic regime’s performance

Input

Secure democratic legitimacy

De-democratization: Questioning of democratic standards

Output

Secure liberal-democratic legitimacy

Legitimacy crisis III Functionalization: Dominance of output legitimation

Input

Output

Legitimation



Foundations of Legitimacy 113

114


Is there a crisis of democratic benchmarks? As suggested above, a considerable number of different legitimation patterns are used in the four national legitimation discourses. The plethora of normative benchmarks available in these discourses is relevant not least because it might reduce the probability of full-blown legitimacy crises. After all, if a broad range of patterns is available to, and deemed acceptable by, the participants in legitimacy-related communication, there will always be at least some criteria on the basis of which the state of a regime can be evaluated as satisfactory, and hence there will be at least a few patterns that lend themselves to relegitimation efforts. But one can also imagine scenarios in which the range of available legitimation patterns facilitates the escalation of delegitimation processes, for it may equally be used to attack a regime from many different angles. As with legitimation objects in Chapter 3, the concentration of legitimation discourses around a few dominant evaluation standards, or their fragmentation, may be expressed with the help of a concentration measure, the ‘effective number’ of legitimation patterns. The measure

18.0 16.0 14.0 12.0 Legitimation

10.0

De-legitimation

8.0

Overall

6.0 4.0 2.0 0.0 CH

DE

GB

US

Figure 4.1 Concentration and dispersal of legitimation discourses (‘effective number’ of legitimation patterns, 2004) Note: For the calculation of ‘effective numbers’ see Figure 3.6, Chapter 3.



sample over the past fifteen years. Are there country-specific, issue-specific, or historically variable legitimation profiles? Or do broad similarities and continuity in the use of legitimation patterns outweigh differences and change?

115

thus indicates the extent to which the array of potentially available criteria is actually drawn on by legitimizers and delegitimizers. The figures for 2004, based on the monitoring corpus, show that a multitude of patterns is in fact employed in each of the four countries. Even when legitimating and delegitimating statements are examined separately, the indicator’s values, which range from 8.5 (US) to 13.1 (CH) and from 9.1 (CH) to 15.5 (US), respectively (against the backdrop of twenty-three patterns that were identified and coded), illustrate a marked spread (overall, the values are close to 13 or 14 in each country). Next, we examined which patterns dominated legitimacy-related communication or remained marginal in each case. Again, we began with a look at the monitoring data for 2004. As with legitimation objects, a list of the patterns of legitimation used most frequently in that year reveals substantial differences across countries but also a few remarkable similarities (Table 4.3). First, only two democratic criteria – popular sovereignty and the protection of human rights – belong to the most frequently used patterns in each case. Otherwise, we observe considerable variation. The patterns of credibility and accountability are unusually prominent in Great Britain; morality, legality, and international standing in the United States; efficiency/effectiveness, credibility, and legality in Germany; efficiency/effectiveness, accountability, moderation, and stability in Switzerland. A closer look at the contexts in which these patterns occurred reveals that the frequency distributions are, in part, linked with the countryspecific policy debates of 2004 (for instance, debates on the British government’s alleged lies in the Iraq War, which raised issues of credibility, or on failed institutional reform initiatives in Germany and Switzerland, which highlighted problems of effectiveness). However, our data also undoubtedly reflect broader institutional characteristics and differences between the political cultures of the four nations. Arguably, credibility and accountability are particularly important in British politics, as the Westminster system’s lack of formalized checks and balances implies that informal conventions of good conduct and the possibility of removing political leaders constitute the main safeguards against the downsides of an ‘elective dictatorship’. Unsurprisingly, by contrast, the pattern of legality is more prominent in the United States and Germany, where constitutional checks and balances, as well as the role of the judicial branch, are much stronger. In a similar fashion, the prominence of effectiveness in German and Swiss legitimacy-related communication may be attributed to the high number of veto players who regularly foster debates over gridlock and political stalemate in these countries. The




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Table 4.3 Patterns of legitimation evaluated in at least five per cent of statements by country (2004)

CH Efficiency, effectiveness Popular sovereignty Accountability Human rights Moderation Stability Total (n)

DE

18.7

15.9

7.0

63.0

6.2

37.5

5.8

68.9

5.4 5.4 (100.0) (776)

Efficiency, effectivess Human rights

18.7

8.0

72.2

7.5

70.3

6.9

14.5

23.8 85.7

Legality

5.5

57.6

43.0

Total (n)

Human rights Popular sovereignty Morality

GB

(100.0) (1,212)

40.9

US

11.2 11.1

55.8 2.6

Popular sovereignty Accountability Efficiency, effectiveness

10.2

40.8

9.5 9.3

19.7 23.1

Legality

33.0

Total (n)

(100.0) (697)

15.4

Popular sovereignty Credibility

Human rights Credibility

Total (n)

Legitimating Statements (% of pattern (%) category)

17.5 9.5

78.2 42.4

6.2

46.2

5.3

60.6

(100.0) (1,239)

52.0

importance of moderation and stability in Switzerland was also to be expected in a system of consensus democracy. We conclude, therefore, that institutional arrangements and political cultures have an influence not only on the political objects highlighted in legitimacy evaluations, and on the legitimating or delegitimating tendency of these assessments, but also on the dominant patterns of legitimation. Thus each of our countries can be said to be characterized by its particular legitimation style with respect to both objects and patterns of legitimation. A second interesting finding is that nearly all patterns of legitimation in Table 4.3 display clear legitimating or delegitimating tendencies, which are, in most instances, stable across countries. Most importantly, legitimacy evaluations that make use of the pattern of human rights tend to result in positive evaluations, while evaluations that refer to



Pattern

Legitimating Statements (% of pattern (%) category) Pattern


117

Group of patterns

CH

DE

GB

US

Overall

Democratic input Non-democratic input Democratic output Non-democratic output Sum input Sum output Sum democratic Sum non-democratic Unspecific Other Total (n)

28.4 9.1

27.9 7.4

43.6 8.5

28.9 9.3

31.1 8.5

11.1

17.8

15.6

19.2

16.5

35.6

28.5

21.5

24.7

27.5

37.5 46.7 39.5 44.7

35.3 46.3 45.7 35.9

52.1 37.1 59.2 30.0

38.2 43.9 48.1 34.0

39.6 44.0 47.6 36.0

11.4 6.5 100.0 (1,239)

11.0 5.4 100.0 (3,924)

12.0 3.9 100.0 (776)

11.5 8.5 6.8 2.3 100.0 100.0 (1,212) (697)

efficiency or effectiveness are mostly delegitimating. These tendencies are in fact symptomatic of the four aggregate categories to which these patterns belong, according to the typology developed above (Table 4.4). As Figure 4.2 shows, democratic output patterns generate the highest share of legitimating statements in all countries except Germany,3 while non-democratic output patterns tend to be delegitimating everywhere. The use of (democratic and non-democratic) input patterns also generally coincides with delegitimating evaluations. While input-oriented evaluations are thus more often negative than output-based ones – a finding that at first glance seems to confirm the hypothesis of a shift in the normative foundations of legitimacy away from the traditional benchmarks of democratic quality – the relationship between democratic and non-democratic patterns suggests a different conclusion, namely, not only that democratic patterns are used considerably more often than non-democratic ones in all countries, with the exception of Switzerland, but also that their use is more likely to coincide with legitimating evaluations. This observation becomes even clearer if we focus on legitimating statements alone. In all four countries, the majority of these statements use democratic patterns. In the United Kingdom, 60 per cent of all legitimating statements are democratic and only 30 per cent non-democratic; in the United States, the figures are 51 per cent and 28 per cent respectively, in Germany



Table 4.4 Legimation statements by country and pattern category (2004, %)

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40 30

10

Dem. input Non-dem. input Dem. output Non-dem. output

0 −10 −20 −30

CH

Figure 4.2 (2004)

DE

GB

US

Legitimating or delegitimating tendency by pattern category

Note: Values were calculated by subtracting the percentage of de-legitimating statements in each pattern category from 50.0 per cent.

47 per cent and 35 per cent, and in Switzerland 45 per cent and 37 per cent. This finding indicates that legitimation takes place mainly on the basis of democratic arguments, and that these are still considerably more important than non-democratic ones in affirming the legitimacy of the four nation states examined and their institutions. Although a wide range of evaluation standards are used in legitimacyrelated communication, we may, therefore, conclude that inputoriented and democratic criteria are still widespread and have not been supplanted wholesale by output-based or non-democratic benchmarks. Even in Germany and Switzerland, where patterns of legitimation that do not conform to traditional standards of democratic quality are more common than in Great Britain and the United States, we could find no indication of a dominance of such patterns. Moreover, it is noteworthy that positive evaluations of legitimation objects still use democratic patterns to an overwhelming extent. However, a regime’s democratic outputs – most importantly the protection of human rights – seem to be a more reliable basis for support than democratic inputs. Nor does the case-study material unequivocally point in the direction of any of the crisis scenarios identified above – or dramatic changes in the use of legitimation patterns. Rather, the evidence is extremely mixed (Figure 4.3). Legitimation debates in most issue contexts remain in – or return to – the area representing ‘secure democratic legitimacy’



20


119

100 90 III

IV US-for

70 60

CHinst

50

UK-for CH-soc

CH-for UK-soc

40

GERinst

GER-for 30

UK-inst

US-inst

20 GER-soc 10

US-soc US-soc

II

I

0 0

10

20

30 40 50 60 70 low Democratic criteria (%) high

80

90

100

Figure 4.3 Case studies: Shifts in the use of democratic patterns and legitimacy levels (1990–2004)

(the upper right-hand area of the figure), and there is also considerable movement in(to and out of) the ‘erosion of democratic legitimacy’ area. The other two crisis scenarios (II and III) are of marginal importance – and there is certainly no evidence for a major ‘transformation of democratic legitimacy’. Still, some kind of shift to output-based arguments might indeed be taking place. Instead of the non-democratic standards of effectiveness and efficiency often highlighted in the literature, however, the democratic criterion of human rights protection seems to be gaining ground as an important foundation of legitimacy assessments. The next two subsections will be devoted to a more detailed examination of the occurrence of individual legitimation patterns in order to establish whether there is evidence of de-democratization or



low

Legitimacy level (%)

high

80

functionalization trends. The evidence of de-democratization is probed first: to what extent are unequivocally non-democratic input standards used in a positive sense? When and where is the regime supported precisely because it is credited with non-democratic features? In a second step, we examine legitimation statements that draw on non-democratic output criteria. Here we enquire whether the results of a political process are a reliable basis for the legitimation of a polity’s constitutional order and basic structures. Does media communication increasingly refer to the performance of a regime, thus shifting attention away from its (presumably shrinking) democratic quality, as quite a few political scientists seem to predict? Towards de-democratization? All legitimation patterns on the input side of our category system that explicitly replace the people as the ultimate point of reference or anchor for the legitimation of political institutions with another source of legitimacy may be qualified as non-democratic. Religious authority is foremost among these criteria, be it the presumed authority of a religious leader, a religious text, or a transcendental force (God, divine authority). Elevating science and ‘truth’ to the level of a source of political legitimacy (expertocratic leadership) belongs to the same category, too, linked either with specific groups of people (scientists or experts as alleged bearers of some secular truth) or with (scientific, theoretical) knowledge as such. A third form that the explicit denial of popular sovereignty might assume is given where legitimacy is tied to the charisma of a leader – a quality that is not grounded in religious or scientific authority but in a leader’s outstanding political talent, visions, skills, and so on (charismatic leadership). Where any of these three criteria of legitimation is employed, a political system is legitimated by non-democratic means or criticized from the perspective of a more or less explicit ideal-type of non-democratic government. Our study, however, indicates that these kinds of non-democratic patterns are marginal in quantitative terms. Religious authority Here we draw on a broad understanding of religious argumentation. Every legitimacy assessment that refers to actors or ‘forces’ that possess qualities grounded in religion, to political leadership that claims to have divine authority or sanctity or to a whole political community’s vocation as a ‘chosen people’, or that spells out a procedure that allows this kind of religious authority to become operative, may thus be qualified as a religious input pattern.




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Although a number of religious topics and more or less religiously based conflicts have gained considerable attention lately, such religiously connotated patterns of legitimation are not prominent. In Germany, 1.8 per cent of all legitimacy evaluations draw on religious benchmarks, and a mere 0.4 per cent and 0.6 per cent in Switzerland and Great Britain; even in the United States the share is only 3.8 per cent. However, these religiously grounded assessments are predominantly delegitimating in the United States; among the delegitimating statements alone, the religious justifications account for 5.5 per cent, and hence do have a certain weight. In the American quality press, then, religious chains of justification are first and foremost a resource of delegitimation rather than legitimation. This is not the case for the other three nations. Yet controversial issues with religious implications need not be debated by way of explicit references to the outlined religious arguments or benchmarks. The ‘headscarf discussion’ in Germany is a case in point. A Muslim teacher who insisted on wearing her headscarf in class sued to gain civil servant status. Her efforts in turn provoked a series of legislative changes in the Länder (federal states), which have authority over education and whose governments attempted to prevent this. The example shows that religiously based political conflict may be debated with primarily liberal arguments (and their counterparts) related to the scope of the state’s neutrality requirement. Expertocratic leadership This type of pattern is even less frequent. It does not exceed the 2 per cent margin in any of the four countries. Neither its legitimating variant – the argument that there are, within or besides the formalized democratic process, persons or groups whose legitimacy is grounded in their superior knowledge – nor critical views on political orders or institutions that are allegedly unable to give knowledgeable persons or groups their ‘due’ voice and weight in decision-making play a sizeable role. Given the importance accorded by much of the academic literature to the cooperation of experts in epistemic communities and the transfer of knowledge within and across administrative networks in the internationalization process, the marginality of expertocratic legitimation might be somewhat surprising. However, such arguments can be advanced in a more indirect fashion. Whereas the non-democratic input justifications described above represent a clear infringement of the normative self-conceptions of democratic systems, and hence may be expected to be ‘costly’ in




discursive terms, references to efficiency and effectiveness (see below) may be slipped much more easily into public discourses even if they implicitly amount to calling for greater power and authority for the bearers of expert knowledge. Legitimation statements that do not refer to expertocratic leadership as such, but rather to the presumed consequences or advantages of knowledge, may thus be more acceptable. Conversely, input justifications based on such arguments should continue to be taboo, as indeed suggested by our data. Charismatic leadership The same holds true for the third input-oriented pattern, namely, references to the charismatic quality of a political leader or elite. Here, too, none of our four national discourses crosses the 2 per cent threshold, and the figure is lowest in the United States. Charisma, understood as the heroic power or outstanding individual qualities of political leaders, is clearly not a popular legitimation resource today. This may be the case because, once again, the use of this pattern conflicts with the democratic self-understandings of Western societies. Nor can the charismatic legitimation pattern be as easily reframed in an indirect, more acceptable fashion as the expertocratic one. Moreover, given its focus on personal qualities – of all kinds, save expert knowledge and religious qualities – this criterion tends to be linked with the delegitimation of authorities, and thus more often than not fails to underpin the more abstract, generalized evaluations of political orders and institutions that we call legitimation statements. Criticism related to a lack of charisma is therefore likely to be almost exclusively directed at the incumbents of government or parliamentary offices. The argumentative path from authorities to the regime level, if it is followed at all, tends to lead no further than to assessments of political elites as a group, that is, the ‘political class’. Criticism of the political class in Germany and Switzerland is indeed occasionally underpinned by references to its lack of charisma, but also by references to its lack of trustworthiness, common-good orientation, knowledge, and effectiveness (see below). In the Anglo-Saxon countries, this pattern does not play a role, and the transfer of the expertocratic or charismatic patterns to other legitimation objects – for instance, to constitutions – is all but non-existent. The political elites may be faced with such attacks in a relatively generalized sense, but the suggestion that constitutions or other political institutions are responsible for an underprovision, as it were, of expert or charismatic leadership is quite obviously too radical to make any headway in legitimation discourses.




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The same appears to be true, mutatis mutandis, for affirmative statements. The public of Western democracies is reluctant to use these two non-democratic patterns, despite the growing importance of ‘media democracy’ with its alleged tendency to foster the personalization of electoral campaigns and the political process in general, and also despite the growing importance of expert knowledge in international contexts. This, we would argue, is a further piece of evidence suggesting that the democratic quality of political communication in the four countries examined is relatively intact. Beyond these three patterns of legitimation, each of which explicitly denies popular sovereignty its role as a master pattern and proposes an alternative source of authority and legitimacy, there are two patterns that also draw on alternative sources of legitimacy, albeit considerably more moderately, and hence can only be interpreted as evidence of a de-democratization trend where they are used in a very radical sense. Tradition Max Weber viewed both charismatic and traditional authority as counter-models to modern, legal–rational forms of authority and legitimacy beliefs. And, while today patrimonial rule is hardly a viable counter-model to the latter, references to tradition may nevertheless have an important role as legitimation resources or underpinning statements that question and criticize political developments. We speak of tradition-oriented patterns of legitimation whenever principles or institutions are positively or negatively evaluated by pointing to the fact that they have been operative for a long time. Often, such traditional institutions and processes are respected out of habit, and citizens only become aware of their existence and character if they are somehow amended or violated. Tradition as a justification for political authority may be used to support a democratic past and the continuity of democratic institutions, but it might also refer to institutions and processes that are not democratic in a narrow sense. Assessments of this kind may further take the form of very general, affirmative references to customs, or may be more specific. And traditions may be invoked in a highly apologetic and explicit fashion – traditionalism as an ideology – or validated through more implicit references to long-standing routines and customs. For instance, references to tradition were quite prominent in German debates on constitutional reform in 1994. But in 2004 – that is, in our monitoring data – they remained marginal. The same holds true for Switzerland and the USA, but not for Britain. In line with expectations




relating to the United Kingdom’s political culture, there is a greater availability of this legitimation resource among the British public than elsewhere. Central to legitimating contexts is the invocation of the historical continuity of a proved and tested institutional framework: ‘To swap the deep comfort of Westminster rule for the hurly-burly of selfgovernment [through Scottish devolution], whatever form it takes, is to place at risk 285 years of progress within a tried and tested constitutional framework’ (Times, 31 March 1992). On the delegitimating side, we encounter references to the need for innovation and a breakaway from the traditional, apparently outdated political order: ‘A renewal of political culture is needed, a genuine debate which involves a wide range of people and which is capable of influencing decision making’ (Guardian, 15 April 1992). The criticism may go beyond the mere demand for new arrangements, dwelling on a detailed description of quaint rules and dissecting them critically: This discrimination [against Catholics in the rules on royal marriages] – that is the only appropriate description – reflects the way in which the constitution operates on the principles of 17th and 18th- century politics, not our own times. According to the Act of Settlement 1701, for example, Prince William could marry a Scientologist, a devotee of the Moonies, or a dogmatic Satanist without incurring legal sanction (provided that any children were then brought up as Protestants). Were he to fall in love with a Catholic, by contrast, then either she would have to renounce her faith or he abandon his claim to the throne, or Parliament would be forced, at haste, to rewrite this ancient legislation. This would be a ludicrous situation. (Times, 16 October 2004) Moderation Another form of legitimation that is closely linked with the pattern of traditional legitimation may be seen in the claim that a political system ensures, or does not ensure, a moderate, tempered style of political conflict resolution. This pattern has a long pedigree, dating as far back as Aristotle’s praise of the middle course and of temperance. In the context of legitimation discourses in and for democratic systems, it is more problematic. After all, democracy itself can hardly be justified as representing the middle course of something. Rather, democracy is bound to certain basic principles, especially popular sovereignty and political equality. References to moderation can, therefore, also be used as argumentative resources against democratic institutions and their core principles.




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While this pattern is rare in Germany and the United Kingdom (0.8 and 1.0 per cent, respectively), it is much more widespread in the United States (3.4 per cent) and Switzerland (5.4 per cent), with a clearly delegitimating thrust. Thus, in the United States, 6.7 per cent of all delegitimating utterances – which typically decry excesses of ‘partisanship’ – draw on the moderation pattern. As in Switzerland, it is usually the political system as a whole, or the political community, that becomes the object of this kind of criticism. In the consensus democracy of Switzerland, the party system is also a frequent object of delegitimation. In other words, this pattern can be used to evaluate objects both at the lower and at the higher end of our object hierarchy.4 In sum, the use of non-democratic input patterns can be qualified as infrequent and only moderately powerful. We may thus surmise that the democratic quality of legitimation discourses is relatively well entrenched, and that discourses are barely touched by such nondemocratic standards. Neither the oft-suspected tendency towards a legitimation of authority on the basis of charismatic leadership qualities nor a quasi-aesthetic dimension – based on style, taste, and appropriateness – is prominent, nor are there indications for a surge in religious, fundamentalist political thought. Functional legitimacy? In this subsection, we probe evidence of a shift towards functional legitimation. A political system is functionally justified whenever nondemocratic output criteria are used to legitimate it. A first glance at our material indicates that non-democratic output criteria are in fact more relevant than the non-democratic input standards discussed above. In some countries (Germany, Switzerland) and policy fields (especially social policy), effectiveness-related argumentations are quite frequent, but ultimately they do not dominate legitimation discourses. Efficiency and effectiveness Often, efficiency-related arguments (which prioritize the evaluation standard of an optimal relationship between costs and benefits) and effectiveness-related arguments (referring to the degree to which stated objectives have been achieved) are not clearly distinguished in public communication. Taken together, they represent almost 19 per cent of all statements in Switzerland, 15 per cent in Germany, 9 per cent in Great Britain, and 5 per cent in the United States. Overall, efficiency and effectiveness-related arguments are used in 11.6 per cent of the identified statements, which makes them one of the most frequent patterns





of legitimation. But, contrary to expectations or hopes expressed in the literature on the legitimacy of the EU and of nation states under internationalization pressure (Majone 1998, 1999, 2001; Scharpf 1999, 2000; Moravcsik 2002, 2005), effectiveness – and efficiency even more so – is mostly used in a delegitimating context in all four countries. Thus the concept of a type of democratic governance that is primarily legitimated by the efficiency and effectiveness that it promises or achieves does not appear to have taken hold of the public. Instead, public perceptions seem to tilt towards the opposite view, namely, that political orders are democratic but ineffective. The academic sphere’s hope of a general shift towards functional legitimacy in the wake of internationalization processes is, therefore, not encouraged by the legitimation discourses examined here. One must take into account, however, that we examine nation states, while some of the cited authors are concerned with the functional legitimacy of international governance arrangements. At the national level, though, there is little evidence for such a transformation. Distributive justice, morality, good international standing Surprisingly, the criterion of distributive justice occurs much less frequently than the efficiency and effectiveness standard (between 2 and 4 per cent of all statements). It is, however, used more often than the latter in a legitimating sense, though not in a majority of the statements that draw on it. In the United States and Germany, positive and negative assessments on the basis of this criterion are more or less balanced, and only in Great Britain is distributive justice (or a lack of it) primarily employed as a delegitimating argument. A nation state may, with the help of adequate multilevel governance arrangements, be able to maintain its effectiveness but is likely to do so at the expense of specific groups, especially immobile groups that are unable to adapt to globalization. The expectation that globalization has winners and losers – and therefore raises problems of justice – is more than plausible. But justice is not used as a key argument against existing political orders in our material, nor is it primarily employed in a critical sense. The same holds for the maintenance of moral standards. At 3 per cent of all statements, this criterion is as frequently used for criticism as it is for the justification of political orders and institutions. To a large extent, the four examined political orders are considered just and moral but much less efficient and effective. By contrast, arguments relating to political stability, the protection or advancement



126

127

of collective identities, or the maintenance of national sovereignty have a predominantly legitimating thrust. These last three arguments thus tend to support national political orders. Together, they underpin a set of legitimating arguments that view existing nationstate arrangements as the ideal of political development, while internationalization tends to be viewed as a threat to stability, identities, and government capacity. The stability argument is mentioned about as frequently as the justice criterion, while references to national sovereignty are quite infrequent. The overall share of these legitimation patterns, in any case, hardly suggests that nation state-centred argumentations might gain ground in legitimation discourses. The clearly legitimating thrust of these patterns, however, indicates that they rival the functional legitimation highlighted by many political scientists. They represent a genuinely national form of legitimation that is oriented towards continuity and stability rather than modernity and effectiveness. The criterion of a good international standing may be encountered in two different strands of reasoning – for instance, in the context of debates on the Iraq Wars. The first strand treats respect for international obligations or success in dealing with international responsibilities as a criterion for the legitimation of national political systems. This undoubtedly constitutes a performance assessment. The second strand, by contrast, may not be interpreted to the same extent as a performance measurement. Here, reference is made to a political status, and the evaluation of one’s own country by third parties assumes the centre stage. The maintenance of its reputation and standing becomes a legitimation criterion in comparative argumentations that unfold against the backdrop of conceptions of an international hierarchy. Notably, the latter kind of argumentation tends to underpin delegitimating statements. The frequency of this pattern and the distribution of legitimating versus delegitimating uses are very similar to the figures for distributive justice. To damage its status is thus as problematic for a political order as disrespect for standards of justice. This should be an effect of internationalization in itself, while there are no indications for a globalization-induced shift towards functional legitimation.

Legitimation risks and threats to democratic legitimation In this section we probe whether and to what extent there are specific threats to the stability of democratic legitimacy in our four countries that remain below the crisis level. Following the examination of non-




democratic patterns in the previous section, we now concentrate on democratic criteria. An overview of the democratic input and output criteria used in public communication reveals the potential challenges to legitimacy that exist even in the context of seemingly intact democratic value orientations – challenges that might be linked with realworld developments or shifts in those value orientations themselves. The central finding is that human rights have become a major pattern of legitimation. They surpass popular sovereignty in their function as stabilizers of democracy. Whereas the full implementation of popular sovereignty tends to be missed, the protection of human rights is widely seen as an important achievement of democratic systems. The positive foundation of democratic legitimacy thus shifts towards human rights, and the liberal justification of democracy now dominates the democratic one. The use of popular sovereignty as a benchmark for the criticism of Western democracies, however, also testifies to the existence of a critical public, as postulated in theories of critical citizens (Norris 1999a, 2002). Democratic input legitimation Popular sovereignty is the core argument in the category of democratic legitimation patterns. Giving up this normative benchmark – as opposed to merely supplementing it with other criteria – would mean no less than the end of democratic legitimation. Democracy cannot be justified in the absence of the principle of popular sovereignty in one form or another, or without the notion of democratic equality – one person, one vote – that it implies. In light of the key role that popular sovereignty has in democratic theory, references to it in a mere 8.5 per cent of all statements in the four national legitimation discourses (ranging from 6 per cent in Switzerland to 10.2 per cent in Great Britain) may, at first, seem somewhat alarming. Moreover, the benchmark of popular sovereignty is by no means used exclusively in legitimating statements. Only in Switzerland and Germany does the use of the pattern clearly tilt towards the affirmative, thus assuming a predominantly legitimating function. In Great Britain and the United States, by contrast, both legitimating and delegitimating uses of the pattern are widespread: quite a few statements, for instance, suggest that popular sovereignty is not (sufficiently) implemented or expressed in the political systems of the two countries, or that the wishes of the people are ignored. This critical use of the pattern is most pronounced in the United States, where it is employed in more than 11 per cent of all delegitimating statements. Quite obviously, the democratic quality of American democracy in its





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current manifestation is rather controversial, which may come as no surprise in the wake of the 2000 presidential elections and developments during the subsequent Bush administration.

When criticizing the democratic quality of a regime and its institutions, however, one may also apply other benchmarks. Legitimation patterns related to transparency, accountability, and credibility primarily point to the relationship between subjects and rulers. In delegitimating contexts, they may even be interpreted as the clearest indicators of alienation between subjects and rulers. The prominence of the credibility pattern – and more precisely of credibility assessments of the regime as a whole, rather than individual authorities – is quite remarkable. It is employed in no less than 5.5 per cent of all statements but most frequently in the United Kingdom (11.1 per cent, as opposed to 3.7 per cent in Switzerland, 6.9 per cent in Great Britain, and 2.3 per cent in the United States). What is more, 5.5 per cent of all statements evaluate objects of legitimation in terms of their accountability, and another 2.3 per cent in terms of their transparency. Taken together, these patterns amount to 13.3 per cent of all statements. The thrust of evaluations using each of these criteria is even more important. Again, Great Britain stands out, with 17 per cent of all delegitimating utterances referring to (a lack of) credibility, 11 per cent to accountability, and 4 per cent to transparency. In other words, almost a third of all delegitimating statements are grounded in one of these three criteria. The British – or more precisely, their mediated contributions to national legitimation discourses – express marked dissatisfaction with their political system because the bond between their government and the people is damaged. But how far does the delegitimating effect of these arguments go? Which levels of legitimation objects are affected? A look at the distribution of delegitimating statements by pattern group and regime level, as in Table 4.5, can help us answer such questions. There is a general predominance of input patterns, but clear differences between the upper and the lower two regime levels also emerge. Almost half of the critical statements in one of our actor categories draw on democratic input patterns. The institutions and actor groups faced with such criticism are thus seen as not democratic enough; they are delegitimated against the backdrop of a normative ideal of democracy and in the hope of further democratization. Yet only a quarter of all delegitimating statements linked with regime principles and the political system as a whole employ



Transparency, accountability, credibility


Object category Regime principles Political community, system Political institutions Actor groups Overall (n)

Democratic input

Nondemocratic Democratic output input

Nondemocratic output

Unspecific, other

Total

26.1

5.8

19.8

31.7

16.5

100.0

27.9

10.5

10.8

33.3

17.4

100.0

48.8

7.9

5.1

29.0

9.2

100.0

46.9 34.0 (755)

15.0 9.5 (211)

11.5 11.9 (264)

14.0 29.6 (658)

12.6 15.0 (333)

100.0 100.0 (2,221)

democratic input patterns. The questioning of the upper two object levels is more often grounded in performance assessments. A third of all pertinent statements draw on non-democratic output criteria. Critiques based on a perceived lack of efficiency, effectiveness, or distributive justice are particularly likely to be linked with a questioning of basic regime principles and entire political systems. Here democracy’s performance makes it a target for criticism. This type of statement, then, is no longer based on the perceived gap between a democratic ideal and reality. According to our typology, such evaluations indicate a shift towards the type II crisis scenario – a performance-based legitimacy crisis of democracy. So far, however, we have focused on delegitimating statements, and have not yet presented the broader picture, which we need to consider in order to corroborate the alleged existence of a legitimacy crisis. Nevertheless, even this isolated finding must be seen as problematic from a normative perspective. There is a tendency, on the delegitimating side of legitimation discourses, to project criticism of the performance of democratic systems onto the basic principles of these systems. This could, with all due caution, be interpreted as evidence of the potential for an impending performance crisis of democracy. Participation, deliberation Those legitimation standards that are associated with critical democratic theory prove to be quite marginal. While in the late 1960s and 1970s the concept of participatory democracy gained some



Table 4.5 Aggregate patterns of legitimation by regime level, for delegitimating statements (2004, %)

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prominence, since the 1990s attention has shifted to the notion of deliberative democracy (Habermas 2001a). The proponents of participatory democracy insisted on the ultimate goal of full participation or involvement of the citizenry in all decision-making processes and governance arrangements, and hence on adherence to – or even on a movement beyond – a merely legal, institutional concept of popular sovereignty as expressed in the notion of parliamentary representation. Proponents of deliberative democracy, while not abandoning the criterion of full citizen inclusion, highlight the quality of political processes. Democratic politics, in this view, has to meet quite demanding rationality criteria by facilitating the adequate exchange of available information and arguments related to cognitive and normative questions, and thus ensuring decision-making practices that let the best arguments prevail. Yet neither participation nor deliberative rationality is widely used in affirmative or critical statements in Germany or Switzerland. In Great Britain and the United States, by contrast, 3.6 per cent and 6.4 per cent of all delegitimating statements criticize a lack of participation opportunities in the respective political systems. A lack of deliberativeness is perceived almost exclusively in Britain, so that this country is faced with the broadest criticism of democratic quality on the basis of democratic input patterns. Legality For the purposes of our analysis, we subsumed legality and the respect for international law under democratic patterns. We did so because a sense of obligation to decisions made in democratic processes is absolutely essential to democratic governance. Legality, then, is nothing but the commitment of the people to their own past decisions – as long as they are not revoked in a democratic procedure, by way of a new decision. In long-established democratic systems (and in this book, we restrict ourselves to the examination of such political orders), legality is not alien to democracy but an immanent requirement. As international legal norms and obligations are, too, decided upon democratically via parliamentary ratification, legality in a broad sense has to be conceptualized as a democratic requirement, and the necessary respect granted to (prior) democratic decisions by citizens and decision-makers. The legality criterion is employed in slightly fewer than 5 per cent of all statements. Given the widespread criticism of democratic quality in our material, moreover, the predominantly affirmative thrust of legalitybased assessments is remarkable. We can be sure, therefore, that critics




of democratic quality are certainly not concerned about a ‘de-legalization’ process. For the mediated public opinion, the legal foundations of democracy are largely intact. In short, the relationship between governments and the people is at the centre of debates on the quality of democracy. The credibility gap of political elites, their lack of accountability, the inscrutability of political decisions, and the failure to deliver on the democratic promise of popular sovereignty underpin this criticism. Democratic output legitimation We now consider democratic output patterns – that is, patterns that draw on those outputs of democratic procedures that are at the same time indispensable for the maintenance of democratic governance. One of the most remarkable findings of our survey of legitimation patterns was precisely the important role of such output-based democratic justifications over input-oriented ones. More than popular sovereignty and similar arguments, it is the politically accomplished respect for human rights that serves as a key legitimation resource. Whereas justifications on the basis of popular sovereignty, accountability, and so on tend to be delegitimating, justifications of the status quo are more likely to make use of a liberal mode of democratic legitimation. Moreover, these patterns draw on a rather antivoluntaristic mode of democratic legitimation, whose starting point is not an empirical or potential volition but the establishment of legal structures that ensure freedom. We count four patterns of legitimation in this output-based group of democratic criteria: reversibility, democratic empowerment, contribution to the common good, and the protection of human rights. Reversibility The criterion of reversibility was particularly stressed in academic debates on the validity and scope of the majority principle in the 1980s. In the context of the environmental movement, the question was raised as to the validity of the democratic majority principle when decisions had to be made on the long-term impact and risks of nuclear energy and nuclear waste – an impact that might still be felt in thousands of years. Only as long as decisions can be reversed, at least in principle and in their key aspects, can the majority principle be accepted even by the defeated minority, according to a prominent voice in these debates (Offe 1983). Normative democratic theory in this vein argues, therefore, that reversibility is an essential aspect of the democratic quality of political outputs.




These considerations may have had immediate political relevance in the heyday of the anti-nuclear energy movement. One might, however, expect this rather complex pattern of legitimation to be less accepted and relevant today. And, indeed, fewer than 1 per cent of all identified legitimation statements employ the pattern, and its use is most frequent in Germany. Although the issue of reversibility is also touched upon in debates on generational justice, the public use of this kind of justification is minimal. Democratic empowerment The legitimation pattern of democratic empowerment is based on a similarly self-reflective argument. A democratic decision contributes to democratic empowerment when it improves the preconditions for democratic decision-making, strengthens the political efficacy of citizens, increases their capacity to participate in the political process, and so on. But this pattern, too, is used rather infrequently. It is most salient in the United Kingdom. Here the democratic empowerment argument is mainly used in affirmative statements. In some cases, however, there is a close link between democratic empowerment and the protection of human rights. Whenever democratic participation rights are highlighted in the context of human rights protection, there is at least an implicit reference to democratic empowerment. Contribution to the common good Subsuming the contribution of political orders and institutions to the common good under the category of democratic rather than non-democratic criteria is undoubtedly a controversial move. Historically, this category is not necessarily a democratic one (Miller 1996; Münkler 2001). But, if the term ‘common’ is taken seriously, the common good always refers to the citizenry as a whole, and hence the pattern has, at least implicitly, a democratic and inclusive character. As soon as references to the whole political community are highlighted and the notion of government for the people occupies centre stage, it becomes plausible to categorize such evaluations as democratic. They represent no fewer than 4 per cent of all legitimation patterns in Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Only in the United States (0.5 per cent) do they hardly occur at all. When this pattern is used, it tends to appear in a delegitimating context. It is the lack of a common-good orientation that is usually criticized, especially in Germany and Switzerland.





Thus the important role of the democratic output category is largely tied to the protection of human rights criterion. In all the countries examined, it is among the most frequently used legitimation patterns. In Great Britain and the United States, the protection of human rights even ranks first, and in Germany it ranks second behind effectiveness; in Switzerland, it is ‘only’ the fourth most frequent pattern. The importance of the criterion becomes even more apparent when only its frequency in legitimating statements is considered: 9.3 per cent in Switzerland, 14.1 per cent in Germany, 18.7 per cent in Great Britain, and 26.2 per cent in the United States. More than a quarter of all positive evaluations in the United States thus refer to outputs of the political system that strengthen liberal and democratic rights. Morerover, the bulk of human rights-based statements are directed at top-level legitimation objects, that is, basic principles of the democratic nation state and the political community. The protection of human rights, therefore, represents the master pattern of all positive evaluations of the political order, especially in the two Anglo-Saxon countries. A legitimation pattern that is primarily grounded in the protection of human rights may be called a liberal or liberal–democratic justification of democracy. The liberal element of ensuring freedom is given particular weight. Without secure civil liberties, a functioning democracy is inconceivable. The specific nature of the current use of human rights as a legitimation standard is, however, linked with its output orientation. A political order is considered legitimate because it guarantees human rights, and because its structures and activities secure and enhance civil liberties. The active component, that is, the promulgation of individual freedom by the political order rather than the identification of freedom and equality as mere preconditions of democratic governance, is highlighted. Democracies are thus considered as producers of freedom both within and, at least in some statements, beyond their own boundaries. Interventions in response to crises in other regions of the world can thus contribute to the relegitimation of the nation state. Human rights v. popular sovereignty? The prominence of human rights-based arguments in our material is highly significant given the ongoing debate between different strands of normative democratic theory on the relationship between human rights and popular sovereignty. It was Rousseau’s democratic theory that first shifted the focus from the will of individuals to the collective will; in a transformative act, his concept turns self-interested bourgeois



Protection of human rights

individuals into citizens capable of collective self-determination. This perspective soon met with criticism. The fear, prominently formulated by Jacob Talmon (1952), that it might have totalitarian consequences, was nurtured by the dictatorial reality of ‘socialist democracies’. In contrast to Rousseau’s endeavour to reconcile freedom and equality for all, and thus to reconcile individual and collective self-determination, freedom and democracy were now construed as conflicting principles. This tension was even depicted as a genuine opposition, as in Carl Schmitt’s (1993) constitutional theory, or wrapped in a sober description of historical processes: Given that freedom, understood as political self-determination, no longer refers to the individual in a democracy but rather to the collective of the people as a whole, thus turning into popular sovereignty, individual freedom has come to mean unalienable human and civil rights. (Kelsen 2006: 9; our translation) A highly influential attempt to reconcile popular sovereignty with human rights was developed by Jürgen Habermas (1998, 2001a). According to Habermas, the internal link between the rule of law and democracy, between popular sovereignty and democracy, must be seen in the fact that ‘human rights institutionalize the communicative conditions for a reasonable political will formation’ (Habermas 1998: 160). This construction allows him to justify the legitimacy of political orders on the basis of legality and popular sovereignty at the same time, without drawing on a merely formalistic understanding of legality. Legitimate democratic rule does not depend on a citizenry capable of direct, self-organized collective action but rather on the institutionalization of legal procedures that enable ‘[p]opular sovereignty, even it becomes anonymous’, to ‘retreat ... into democratic procedures and the legal implementation of their demanding communicative presuppositions only in order to make itself felt as communicatively generated power’ (Habermas 2001a: 301). At the same time, however, Habermas must concede that the described link between popular sovereignty and human rights obtains for political rights but not for liberal, private rights. These liberal rights are therefore justified in terms of their intrinsic value, which stems from the fact that they are, as it were, co-provided by the legal medium because the legal code implies the status of free legal persons, without which it would be inconceivable. The legal code itself is, according to Habermas, not in need of further normative justification, but rather




can be assumed to be ‘effective and unproblematic’ because modern societies ‘seem to have no functional equivalent for the integrative achievements of law’ (164). The Habermasian construction is, however, prone to criticism because liberal rights are given a prenormative status and thus rendered hierarchically superior to political rights. They are a priori useful and unproblematic. Thus (liberal) human rights (to the extent that they can be traced back to the legal medium) gain priority over popular sovereignty, even if the latter is itself expressed through legal procedures. Where legal patterns of legitimation are used, this could, again, mean that output-based justifications outweigh inputoriented ones, as the correspondence between political outputs and human rights becomes more important than the correspondence between decision-making processes and legally institutionalized norms of democratic procedure. In contrast to Habermas’s reconciliation of human rights and popular sovereignty, there is also Ulrich Beck’s recent conception that a selflegitimating rule of law might become the key legitimation resource and standard in the global political context. With a view to the dangers to which civilization exposes itself in the global risk society, he argues (2005): The rule of human rights is self-legitimating and knows no limits. It follows the logic of ahistoric self-justification – it is based not on voting but on consent, not on conquest but on non-conquest, not on democracy but on reason. .... This gives rise to a space of expectation directed towards a global military power charged with establishing and keeping order; such a space is constituted wherever calls for the defence of human rights – the source of legitimacy for global power – are combined with the expectation that current cross-border conflicts which pose a threat to the order of human rights should be regulated. The silent compulsion that leads to knowledge and understanding of what is good – the power of self-legitimation – takes the place of democratic legitimation. Hence popular sovereignty and human rights are described as conflicting principles. By contrasting human rights-based legitimation, supposedly adapted to modern times, with the presumably outdated principle of popular sovereignty, new supranational or international political regimes may certainly be justified more easily, since they do not have general elections or mechanisms for democratic participation.




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Thus the tendency to (implicitly or explicitly) prioritize human rights over popular sovereignty is widespread in current theoretical debates. Viewed in the light of democratic theory, this accentuation becomes problematic when it is used for a direct criticism of democratic input legitimation. Against the backdrop of the theoretical debates presented above, one has to ask whether the criteria of human rights protection are (with Habermas) linked with a focus on the rule of law and reconciled with popular sovereignty, or whether they are (with Beck) positioned against the criterion of democratic decision-making. In order to shed light on this question, those articles that link human rights with popular sovereignty were scrutinized more closely (see also Wiesner et al. 2006). This analysis shows that there is a common tendency to conceptualize the relationship between human rights and popular sovereignty in ‘harmonious’ terms. Texts that present the relationship between the two as strongly antagonistic are rare in all four countries. There are, however, various discursive strategies that help reconcile them, and their popularity and nature vary from one country to another. Notably, we identified a superficial association between the two, a ‘subset model’, and an ‘equilibrium model’. The superficial association between legal and democratic principles is exemplified in formulaic expressions like ‘the democratic and rule of law-based system of the Basic Law’, in the invocation of a ‘freedomoriented democratic culture’, or in the presentation of a country as the ‘home of democracy and the rule of law’ or of ‘freedom and democracy’, and so on. In such expressions, the precise relationship between the two principles is not further elucidated, but their combination suggests that they can be reconciled without difficulty. In the subset model, either human rights are introduced as an essential element of democracy, or popular sovereignty is presented as an essential element of human rights. The second type of linkage may occasionally be encountered in the United States but overall remains marginal. In Switzerland, the first variant is the dominant type of linkage. Human rights, especially in the sense of civil liberties, are interpreted as the inevitable outcome of popular sovereignty, as expressed by way of direct-democratic procedures, and this link is strongly legitimated. The strategy of reconciling popular sovereignty with human rights, however, implies a slight devaluation of legal legitimation criteria as against volition-based criteria. Therefore it has not gone uncriticized even in Switzerland, especially after it was used by the Swiss People’s Party – in the context of verdicts of the Federal Court on asylum and citizenship policy – to justify attacks




on the independence of the judiciary. A number of articles written in response to these attacks suggest that popular sovereignty is limited by legal principles. Arguments of this kind may be subsumed under the equilibrium category. This category presents the rule of law and legal rights on the one hand, and democracy on the other, as principles that mutually and constructively restrict or support each other. Potential conflicts between legitimation patterns related to the two are neither suppressed nor ruled out at a conceptual level. However, where an equilibrium is considered intact, such a conflict is not diagnosed. The equilibrium model may be found in all four examined countries but is particularly dominant in the United States and Great Britain. In the United States, many articles discuss, either critically or affirmatively, the hypothesis that too much influence by the judiciary (judicial activism) threatens the equilibrium – a claim that was notably made by conservatives in 2004 in the context of legal decisions on gay marriage (and related ballot initiatives in the elections of that year). However, in our material such criticism of the growing power of ‘unelected’ judges is largely sidelined by statements that legitimate constitutional guarantees and the judicial branch as their protector: ‘The U.S. Constitution, properly construed by a vigilant Supreme Court, prevents untrammeled power, which is the definition of despotism’ (Washington Post, 19 September 2004). According to this line of reasoning, civil liberties are jeopardized ‘by an excess of democracy, both in the United States and abroad, and ... a “simple-minded populism” has thrown the American political system out of whack’ (New York Times, 9 May 2004). Popular sovereignty and human rights protection by the courts are deemed compatible: To the extent that the courts do have a leading role, it is perfectly natural. Gay marriage opponents like to portray judges as alien beings, but state court judges are an integral part of state government. They were elected, or appointed by someone who was. The founders created three equal branches, and a Constitution setting out broad principles, at both the national and state levels. Courts are supposed to give life to phrases like ‘equal protection’ and ‘due process’. Much of the nation’s progress, from integration to religious freedom, has been won just this way. (New York Times, 7 March 2004) The affirmation of legal criteria of legitimation is even clearer in Great Britain than in the United States, once again, in reaction to polit-





As ever, Labour’s default position is still to say that parliamentary sovereignty is always good and judicial intervention is always bad. That has always been the party’s comfort zone. But whose interests does Labour – or indeed any government – stand for now? Politics have changed since 1901. In complex modern societies, the citizen needs the protection not just of codes like the Human Rights Act and even the putative European constitution, but of courts which are strong enough to apply basic principles of justice to an administrative bureaucracy which Ken Livingstone recently described as being like East Germany with periodic elections. Fairness matters just as much as democracy. (Guardian, 9 March 2004) In Germany, too, equilibrium arguments are predominantly used to affirm the value of the rule of law or human rights protection vis-àvis popular sovereignty. Thus there are frequent references to the idea that, while on the surface the rule of law and human rights appear to limit the scope of democracy, they ultimately strengthen it. By contrast, the inverse argument that democratic decision-making procedures and control mechanisms might support the protection of human rights occurs much less frequently. As a legitimation argument, human rights protection is hardly ever questioned, and it may even be mustered as an argument against the introduction of direct-democratic procedures: The majority is not infallible. The rule of the majority is not always right. There are issues that simply cannot be decided by way of majority decision. This is particularly true for individual civil liberties, basic rights and property rights. The constitutionality and appropriateness of infringements of basic rights cannot be verified by way of a referendum. ‘Rules of law’ that can only be changed through qualified procedures must limit the scope of democracy here. There is generally a need ... for a smaller playing field on which the democratic principle may compete with the rule of law. (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 8 September 2004)



ical events. Here many articles suggest the need for a strengthening of the rule of law with the help of judicial activism or by way of a written, codified constitution – instruments for countering the concentration of power in the hands of a democratically elected government (‘elective dictatorship’) that the British political system affords:


Examples like this illustrate that it is also possible to use the protection of human rights for a criticism of unconstrained popular sovereignty on the basis of an equilibrium argument. The tendency to use such arguments is evident in all countries except Switzerland, but it is hardly as prominent or undisputed as some of the theoretical contributions reviewed above would lead one to expect. As the key output-based legitimation standard, human rights protection is not usually invoked to devalue input-oriented standards such as popular sovereignty. Contrary to the expectation that the public of democratic nation states increasingly ensures the legitimacy of national political orders by reference to effective problem solution, our findings suggest another kind of shift towards output legitimation. The protection of human rights as an outcome of political decision-making is valued in its own right, and is usually the basis of strong legitimation. This, too, is likely to play a role in explaining why there are no indications of a globalization-induced legitimacy crisis in our material. Not only may effectiveness arguments compensate for the reduced scope of democratic decision-making capacity in line with the principle of popular sovereignty – instead, human rights-based arguments are particularly frequent on the output side. In short, one might say that the law is about to change from the input to the output side in legitimation contexts. Critical citizens? In its interpretation of diminishing citizen trust in the political institutions of Western democracies, the literature proposes two distinct lines of reasoning. In the traditional interpretation prevalent in democratic theory, such losses of confidence represent a clear warning signal and are thus considered to be evidence of dangers to the stability of democracy as a system of government. We have so far followed this line of reasoning in our search for signs of a legitimacy crisis. A more recent line of interpretation, however, links the alleged signs of declining trust with critical citizens who have higher expectation levels with regard to political institutions. Here, too, the use of our category system – with its distinction between input-oriented and output-based, democratic and non-democratic forms of legitimation and delegitimation – is helpful in obtaining a clearer picture. The ‘critical citizen’ interpretation suggests that we should observe a strong questioning of the democratic quality (democratic input legitimacy) of political orders but not of democracy itself at the level of mediated public communication. This is exactly what we find in the material. The four national public spheres adopt the role of a critical authority that demands a greater degree of democracy



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and expects more democratic quality from political institutions without condemning democracy per se or holding it responsible for undesirable developments. However, one has to ask whether the loss of trust diagnosed by public opinion research can truly be interpreted as an exclusive problem on the input side. If it were, instead, linked to a ‘loss of trust in system effectiveness’ (Pickel and Pickel 2006: 94; our translation), the examination of our material through the lens of our category system should again be revealing. A trend towards a more critical public would have to be diagnosed if both the democratic quality and the current performance of political orders were questioned, and if there were evidence that the criticism had no bearing on the support for a democratic or liberal–democratic system in general. We should not, therefore, expect to encounter statements questioning democracy as such, and there should also be a considerable number of positive, legitimating statements. This expectation is based on the idea that an exclusively critical public is selfdestructive, that too few positive utterances create an opinion climate in which the difference between harsh, albeit democracy-immanent, criticism on the one hand, and positions suggesting alternatives within as well as beyond democracy on the other, is no longer recognizable for any of the participants in legitimation discourses. The considerable extent of democratic output legitimation in the national public spheres may be understood as such a stabilizing element against a dangerous slide into overcritical discourses. The fairly substantial amount of democratic input or democratic output delegitimation is countered, moderated, restricted, and confined within the realm of ‘internal’ criticism of democracy by the equally high volume of democratic output legitimation. As a consequence, the ‘critical citizen’ interpretation in its broad sense appears to be corroborated by our examination of legitimacy-related media discourses. The legitimacy situation of the four examined national public spheres in 2004 may be interpreted as evidence of a functioning critical public.

National differences The hypothesis that the democratic quality of legitimation processes is eroding may be further qualified once the results of our case studies are considered. These show markedly different patterns in Great Britain and the United States on the one hand, and in Germany and Switzerland on the other. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, non-democratic arguments, especially output-based arguments focusing on efficiency





and effectiveness, are particularly influential in social policy, a field in which, as already described above, the intensity of legitimation debates is unusually low. By contrast, the much livelier debates on institutional reforms make use of democratic and non-democratic arguments more or less evenly, with a slight preponderance of arguments focusing on democratic inputs. In the field of foreign policy, democratic patterns of legitimation – both input and output-oriented – clearly dominate. Again, this may be attributed to comparisons of institutions in these countries with institutions abroad or with supranational and international regimes that are portrayed as less participatory, less accountable, and less able to protect basic human rights. Finally, no general tendency towards the growing importance of non-democratic or output-based patterns of legitimation is apparent in these two countries. In contrast, non-democratic, and particularly output-oriented, patterns play a much greater role in Germany and Switzerland. Here, media debates on social policy, and especially on institutional reforms, are to a large extent dominated by allegations of gridlock and limited ‘reformability’ – allegations that foster discussions about effectiveness and the extent to which the two regimes serve the common good. In foreign policy, both countries are often portrayed as ‘special’ in a particular respect. Germany’s past has given rise to a pronounced concern for questions of international standing (how are the country’s foreign policies judged by the rest of the world?), while Switzerland’s long-standing neutrality has given uncommon weight to non-democratic output patterns such as tradition, identity, and stability. Legitimation debates in Germany and Switzerland are thus much more clearly dominated by output-oriented, non-democratic arguments than those in Great Britain and the United States. Such national differences may be explained on the basis of Fritz Scharpf’s (2005: 715–21) legitimation theory. Following Tsebelis (2002) and Vivien A. Schmidt (2002), Scharpf distinguishes between systems with only a few veto players, and hence a high degree of power concentration, and systems with many veto players and power diffusion. Great Britain is the prototype of the first variant. By contrast, the other three political systems examined here are characterized by power diffusion. Germany and Switzerland are certainly among the systems with the highest number of veto players, notwithstanding the fact that the number of veto players may change historically or – as Tsebelis (2002: 89–90) shows for Germany – vary from one issue area to another. For systems with power concentration, we would expect a high problemsolving capacity, weakly institutionalized control mechanisms, and a



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●

low frequency of delegitimating references to efficiency and effectiveness, transparency and deliberation, more frequent use of the accountability and participation patterns.

Our data largely confirm these expectations. Efficiency and effectivenessrelated arguments are indeed used less frequently in Great Britain than elsewhere, though mostly in negative assessments. Accountability is much more widespread as a benchmark in critical statements. Eighty per cent of all evaluations in the monitoring corpus drawing on this standard are negative. The delegitimating use of the criterion of popular sovereignty should be mentioned here as well, as it often contains – in a slightly different linguistic form – similar points of criticism to statements using the participation criterion. By contrast, we would expect the following in systems with power diffusion and a high number of veto players: ●

●

predominantly negative use of the criteria of efficiency and effectiveness, transparency and deliberation; low degree of delegitimating use of the accountability and participation criteria.

For Germany and Switzerland, both highly fragmented systems, Scharpf’s expectations are corroborated by the outstanding role of effectiveness as a critical assessment standard (82 per cent and 83 per cent respectively of all statements using it are delegitimating). The transparency and deliberativeness of political debates are, however, not very frequently assessed in Switzerland, nor is the negative use of these criteria predominant. On the other hand, accountability is mentioned quite frequently in Switzerland (6.2 per cent of all statements), and 63 per cent of the pertinent statements are critical. In Germany, transparency is used in roughly 4 per cent of all statements, with an unequivocally negative tendency. The same holds true for accountability, whereas participation and the deliberative quality of the political process remain irrelevant in the German discourse. Overall, Fritz W. Scharpf’s argumentation receives some confirmation. The public, therefore, reacts to



focus of public discourses on the opposition and voters. If these hypotheses, which were developed in the context of a normative legitimation theory, are translated into an empirical context, then the following distribution of patterns on the delegitimating side could be hypothesized for Great Britain as a political system with power concentration:


the legitimacy situation of a political system in a way that corresponds to the expectations that may be derived from the application of normative legitimation theory to specific institutional arrangements: a system with more power concentration is less prone to deficits in terms of problem-solving capacity but has deficits with respect to the control of power. Performance crises The case studies on political debates in the 1990s and early 2000s show a particularly strong output orientation in Germany. Both the debates of 1997 and 1999 on social policy and the debates over Germany’s (non-)participation in the two Iraq Wars of 1991 and 2003, as well as the discussion on federalism reform in 2003, were dominated by nondemocratic output patterns. Of the six debates examined, only the one on constitutional reform in 1994 privileged other arguments. This particular debate, however, reached a comparatively low intensity. The reunification process in 1990 consisted by and large of a wholesale transfer of the Federal Republic’s legal and institutional structures to the East, and the reform did little more than clarify a few marginal issues rather than tackling the challenges of reunification as such. The political debate rarely even turned into what we call legitimation discourses for our purposes. In all other cases, effectiveness or the country’s international standing were the dominant evaluation criteria. It is remarkable that institutional reforms, too, were primarily discussed against the backdrop of effectiveness standards, with a consistent delegitimation of the existing system. This is particularly true for the so-called federalism reform. After reunification and the addition of five new Länder in the East (the former GDR) to West Germany’s eleven federal states, fiscal questions and the issue of redistribution had to be clarified. However, the Joint Constitutional Commission that deliberated between 1992 and the end of 1993 had not restricted itself to working on the rearrangement of German federalism, but had also achieved the entrenchment in the Basic Law, in 1994, of new rules for the involvement of the Länder at the EU level. The long-standing discussion as to whether German federalism had to be reformed, given the disparities between large and small, rich and poor states, and also given the strong role of the Bundesrat as Länder representation in the national legislative process, was again taken up in 2003 in a fresh attempt at thorough institutional reform. A reform proposal was drawn up and a Federalism Commission was established. Its purpose was to develop a concept that could muster the required two-thirds majority in the



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Bundestag and the Bundesrat. The commission’s work, however, failed after hardly more than a year because no compromise could be found between the federal level and the Länder, or between Länder dominated by Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, respectively. In the final phase of the commission’s work, and in subsequent months as well, the intensity of legitimation discourses was considerable, and these discourses were dominated by statements delegitimating the current state of federalism in Germany. The effectiveness-based criticism was closely linked with the equally delegitimating use of transparency and accountability patterns, and the overall argumentation might, therefore, be called a critique of political and democratic, rather than of economic, performance. A more economically and fiscally oriented criticism prevailed in the case of debates on the German old age security system. Here the welfare state was delegitimated on the basis of effectiveness as well as commongood and credibility arguments. The discourse on social policy remained largely stuck at the level of policy debates. Where it reached the level of a genuine legitimation discourse, however, it proved to be highly delegitimating. A similar pattern can be identified with respect to debates surrounding the National Health Service (NHS), the institutional core of the British welfare state. In a rather atypical fashion for the United Kingdom, the effectiveness pattern dominated the highly delegitimating discourse on the crisis of the NHS. This criticism occasionally broadened into a general questioning of British public services and the political system that is supposed to guarantee them. Yet the scope of criticism appears limited when compared with the system’s emphatic defence as a ‘benchmark of civilisation in this century’ (Times, 8 April 1992) or as an ‘oasis of humanity in a materialistic desert’ (Guardian, 27 June 2001). It is remarkable that there seem to be no arguments of similar emotional intensity that can be turned against the NHS. Even at the climax of the NHS crisis and of the scandalization of its performance deficits, the delegitimating arguments continued to be mainly technocratic in character. The vocabulary of freedom and choice was almost completely lacking in delegitimating arguments. Critics were unable to use the strongest and most value-laden arguments because the welfare state principles embodied in the NHS are, ultimately, broadly accepted. The fact that output arguments were primarily employed in a delegitimating sense in all the examined debates suggests, on the one hand, that the national public spheres do in fact signal dissatisfaction with the performance of their respective political systems. Closer inspection,





on the other hand, reveals the limited scope of this dissatisfaction. The basic assumption of this interpretation is that, as long as performance criticism refers to institutions that are relatively close to the policy field in question, the criticism may be evaluated as rather weak. Thus, in social policy, the legitimation object ‘welfare state’ is relatively close, in foreign policy the political community as a whole, and in debates on institutional reforms it is the constitution or specific institutions that are at the centre of reform attempts. Likewise, in the case studies on Germany, effectiveness criticism in the social policy field only refers to the welfare state, in debates on federalism reform it refers to federalism, and in debates on the Iraq Wars to the political community and system. Very infrequently, effectiveness criticism is transferred to other objects such as, for instance, the political class in social policy debates, and hence to an object that is low down in the legitimation hierarchy. In other words, effectiveness criticism here does not extend beyond the direct environment of the policy in question, and the legitimation discourse remains within the confines of policy debates and their issues. Moreover, output patterns, and hence the questioning of performance, dominate – so that the criticism cannot be said to be levelled at the core principles of democracy. We call this ‘policy-oriented performance criticism’ and assume that it is less problematic in terms of legitimation. However, where performance criticism goes beyond non-democratic output criteria, and especially where it reveals systematic contempt for civil liberties and the common good, the discourse becomes more problematic in terms of legitimation, as it now touches upon the core of democracy and the rule of law. Performance criticism is most problematic where it refers to legitimation objects that are not implied in, or close to, the policy field. The criticism of such objects is based on a discursive link between the respective policy debate – for instance, on old age security – and an object such as the nation state, democracy, or the political order at large. The delegitimating statement must bridge the gap between the specific issue and a more distant object, and hence achieve a projection of criticism, as it were. Where this projection is successful, and to the extent that related arguments are used frequently, it indicates that a legitimacy-related conflict can no longer be restricted to a policy issue and its immediate context. In this case, we are dealing with a transferable performance criticism, which is likely to be more challenging in terms of legitimation. The German case, however, was characterized by solely policy-oriented performance criticism between 1990 and 2004.



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Yet there is also a less sanguine interpretation of this constellation that gives more weight to long-term effects. This interpretation of our empirical findings may be developed along the lines of Seymour M. Lipset’s legitimation theory in Political Man. Lipset distinguishes between the legitimacy and the effectiveness of a political system, whereas we consider effectiveness, too, as a legitimation pattern. Legitimacy here refers to the conviction of citizens ‘that the existing political institutions are the most appropriate ones for the society’ (Lipset 1981: 64), while the term effectiveness refers to citizens’ assessments of the current economic and political capacity of their institutions. The stability of a political system hinges upon these two variables, but legitimacy is more important because it underpins stable attitudes that are less dependent on current trends. Hence countries with high legitimacy and low effectiveness are more stable than countries with low legitimacy and high effectiveness. Against this backdrop, Lipset not only attempts to classify individual countries but also develops a dynamic conception, with post-war West Germany as its most important application. According to this conception, a political system without legitimacy and effectiveness first becomes an economically successful country whose institutional arrangements still lack legitimacy; ultimately, however, economic stability induces a political order that is both effective and legitimate. Success with regard to economic as well as political performance standards (no corruption, and so on) thus induces stable legitimacy. According to this interpretation of developments, beginning with the West German economic miracle of the 1950s and ushering in the stable republic of the 1980s, growth and prosperity were the basis for the delayed emergence of democratic legitimacy. Expressed in terms of our approach, Lipset’s notion of legitimacy is equivalent to input legitimation, while his concept of effectiveness corresponds to output legitimation and positive evaluations of the political class. Thus a maximum of stability obtains where democratic legitimation is secure and positive assesssments of a system’s output prevail. What does it mean, though, when the level of input legitimation continues to be relatively high but the system’s effectiveness is given a strongly negative assessment, as is especially the case in Switzerland and Germany? Following Lipset, these systems are likely to lose their stability, and, if ineffectiveness persists, their legitimacy might also be undermined. At least, this should be expected if one reasons that, if times of economic growth and political effectiveness are conducive to ‘democracy learning’, then, conversely, continuously low economic





performance and problems such as corruption, scandals, and procedural deficits in the political apparatus are conducive to ‘un-learning’ democracy. Consequently, a decline in output legitimacy would have to be understood as a dramatic phenomenon if it continued over a long period. Ultimately, negative assessments of the performance of a political system cannot be without consequences for the positive evaluations of its basic structures and procedures. If the benefits of a system are no longer seen and its success is flagging, procedural and input assessments may suffer as well. This hypothesis of decline, however, contradicts findings from public opinion research – for Eastern Europe, for example, continuously low effectiveness values have been monitored alongside high legitimacy values over a long period (Westle 2007: 105–14). The expectation is even more problematic if the protection of human rights and the stabilization of democratic procedures are also subsumed under the output category, as we have done here with our category of democratic output patterns. One could thus argue, contrary to Lipset, that effectiveness can no longer be understood primarily in economic terms and in terms of the functioning of the political apparatus, but that it also comprises the legal output, notably the protection of civil liberties and democratic rights. As long as the effectiveness of a political system is secure in a liberal sense, the loss of economic and political effectiveness does not necessarily lead to a decline of democratic input legitimacy. Democracy crises, democratic reforms The two Anglo-Saxon countries, by contrast, are characterized by a stronger input orientation. The problem addressed here is a crisis of democracy, and democratic reforms are regarded as viable solutions to this problem. How the acceptance of political orders and institutions may be renewed after being exposed to sometimes extensive questioning and criticism is illustrated by our case study on constitutional reform in Great Britain during the 1990s. The topic occupied centre stage during the final years of the Conservative government and dominated the electoral campaigns of 1992 and 1997. The fundamental points of criticism that came to the fore in these debates had been voiced ever since the 1970s: discrimination against small parties, caused by the singlemember plurality electoral system, the inappropriate representation of Britain’s ‘nations’, especially Scotland and Wales, the concentration of power in the hands of the executive, and the lack of checks and balances by means of a democratically legitimate second chamber of parliament or a constitutional court (‘elective dictatorship’).



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The relevance of this criticism was, however, further underscored by developments in the early 1990s (Foley 1999: 44–109). In several elections, a rather slim plurality of the Conservatives translated into a huge majority of seats in parliament. The Tories won hardly any seats in Scotland, which reinforced the impression of inadequate representation. Moreover, the tightly led Thatcher government imposed far-reaching reforms against considerable opposition (for instance, the introduction of the ‘poll tax’; see Deacon and Golding 1994). Against the backdrop of these developments, a set of interrelated demands and proposals emerged from the early 1990s onwards with different elements and variants that were all subsumed under the heading of ‘constitutional reform’ (Foley 1999: 110–55): the creation of regional parliaments and separate executive agencies in Scotland and Wales (‘devolution’), as well as the strengthening of local and regional tiers of government in general; a reform of the electoral system, and notably the introduction of a proportional (PR) system; the abolition or reform of the House of Lords, perhaps in connection with the establishment of an independent constitutional court; the entrenchment of a written, codified constitution, or at the very least a second, more encompassing bill of rights, the latter perhaps by incorporating the European Human Rights Convention into British law; and, finally, a law guaranteeing freedom of information (‘Freedom of Information Act’). While such demands had long been the reserve of the Liberal Democrats, separatist or regional parties (Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru), pro-constitutional reform lobby groups such as Charter 88, progressive think tanks such as the Institute for Public Policy Research, and leftist or liberal media such as the Guardian, the Observer, or New Statesman & Society, the reform proposals were finally taken up by Labour as well in the early 1990s. The Conservatives, by contrast, objected to all such proposals. When a Tory defeat seemed possible in both 1992 and 1997, far-reaching constitutional reform became a realistic scenario and therefore greatly influenced electoral campaigns in both election years. To a large extent, these debates were immediately relevant to the legitimation of the British system. While Labour and the Liberal Democrats criticized the institutional status quo, the Conservatives’ campaign strategy was based on a relegitimation of the traditional system of government, linked with a kind of ‘fear-mongering’ strategy that referred to the dangers of constitutional reform (for instance, the secession of Scotland and the strengthening of radical parties through PR). According to Prime Minister John Major and many observers, this strategy brought about the Tories’ surprise victory in 1992. The repetition





of the strategy in 1997 failed, however. After its accession to power, Tony Blair’s Labour government quickly implemented some reform elements (devolution, the incorporation of the European Human Rights Convention). Others were implemented at least partially, albeit over a prolonged period (abolition of seats for hereditary peers in the House of Lords, Freedom of Information Act). Yet others, such as electoral system reform, were deliberately sidetracked and watered down or, as for example the establishment of a constitutional court, failed due to opposition in the House of Lords. Both in 1992 and at the time of the partial implementation of constitutional reform, accountability, popular sovereignty, and tradition were among the most frequently used legitimation patterns. The tradition argument was almost exclusively used in delegitimating statements in 1992, especially in references to the outdated character of the political system (‘our partly democratised 17th century constitution’, Guardian, 6 March 1992). In 1997, however, almost half of the references to tradition were in legitimating statements; delegitimating statements tended to draw on democratic input criteria, with the lack of accountability mechanisms and the injustice of the electoral system mentioned most frequently. With the implementation of constitutional reform, the tradition argument shifted from the critical to the affirmative side. As the institutional crisis abated, criticism subsided and expressions of support picked up. The limited reform capacity of the system proved sufficient to weather a potential democracy crisis and to renew acceptance. A similar dynamic may be observed in the case of the Swiss constitutional reform, though the point of departure was different. Inputoriented criticism of the procedures of direct democracy was entirely overshadowed by output-based allegations of inertia, especially in the first phase of constitutional reform during 1995 and 1996. The Bundesversammlung (federal parliament) had decided in 1987 to reform popular rights in the context of a broader revision of the constitution. No radical changes were envisaged, however, only rather piecemeal amendments to redress institutional imbalances and to secure the functioning of direct democracy. In 1995, the Bundesrat (federal government) published a reform proposal and attempted to trigger a broad public discussion that was to continue until February 1996. In 1997, the constitutional commissions of the two chambers of parliament (Nationalrat, Ständerat) drafted a reform concept that the two chambers debated in 1998. On 18 April 1999, the new constitution was accepted in a referendum, albeit without the section dealing with a reform of popular rights. In the summer of 1999, this section was rejected for



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good by the two chambers, due to major differences concerning the proposal to increase the minimum number of signatures required for initiating a referendum. At the same time, the Ständerat demanded the development of reform proposals that might be accepted by a majority of the people. The parliamentary deliberations continued until October 2002 under the promising title ‘removal of the functional deficits of direct democracy’. On 9 February 2003, the people finally adopted the revised proposals in another referendum. The relegitimation of popular rights increased during the course of the reform process, which gradually turned into an expert debate on details of direct democracy, thus shifting from a genuine legitimation discourse to a mere policy debate. The criticism of direct democracy’s inertia and ineffectiveness was balanced and even sidelined by the justification of ‘a cautious approach to institutional reform’ (NZZ, 10 January 2003). The failure of the first reform attempt did not strengthen the criticism of the existing system’s ineffectiveness, but rather, in the wake of the implementation of smaller changes, nurtured a revival of support for direct democracy in the media. The debate in the context of the referendum on the bilateral agreement with the EU in 2000, during which support for direct democracy was frequently and emphatically expressed on all sides of the political spectrum, may also have contributed to this relegitimation. Thus criticism of direct democracy did not turn into a democracy crisis in the wake of prolonged reform discussions, but rather resulted in a cautious reform and the revival of input-oriented legitimation. Where an existing political order is involved in international conflicts, references to democracy facilitate its self-legitimation by way of claims about the international superiority of the West, Europe, or the United States, respectively. In such situations, we do not encounter the application of democratic input criteria to a potentially defective domestic political institution. Instead, the norm is treated as a reality; the extent to which one’s own standards are met is not questioned further, but rather contrasted with an enemy who does not even acknowledge these standards. This may be illustrated by means of the case study on foreign policy in the United States. Whereas the debate on the electoral system in 2000 was strongly characterized by the input-oriented questioning of domestic institutions, and although relegitimation soon gained the upper hand with or without genuine reform, in the case of the two Iraq Wars in 1990/91 and 2002 the legitimation patterns of human rights and civil liberties protection, popular sovereignty, deliberation, and




accountability dominated public communication. They were all widely assumed to be met in ‘this great nation’, the United States. Quite frequently, these patterns were linked with the frame of an American mission, as in a speech by George Bush, Sr quoted in the New York Times (23 November 1990): ‘Last year on a snowy Thanksgiving eve up there at Camp David, I spoke to the American people about the newly fallen Berlin wall, and the piece of the wall that sits on my desk is a reminder of our steadfast role in the worldwide explosion of freedom.’ In a similar vein: ‘That is where our strength and political base lies: in the hopes and trust of those who yearn for democracy, nowhere else’ (New York Times, 25 December 1990). And in Bush, Sr’s 1991 State of the Union Address, the topic is once again addressed (and repeated many times in the media): For two centuries, America has served the world as an inspiring example of freedom and democracy. ... The strength of a democracy is not in bureaucracy, it is in the people and their communities. ... And that’s what America is all about. ... Yes, the United States bears a major share of leadership in this effort. Among the nations of the world only the United States of America has both the moral standing and the means to back it up. We are the only nation on this earth that could assemble the forces of peace. (New York Times, 30 January 1991) The New York Times (20 January 1991) describes this affirmative mechanism as follows: Executive decisions to enter into combat inevitably invoke a national ideology shaped by the belief that the United States is different from, and even superior to, the other nations of the world. Americans have considered it their mission to spread – usually by example but sometimes by direct intervention – freedom and justice around the world. There is no overestimating this essentially moral imperative ... . In 2002, the mechanism once again proves effective, as in the (quoted) words of British Prime Minister Tony Blair: ‘For all the resentment of America, remember one thing. The basic values of America are our values, too, British and European, and they are good values: democracy, freedom, justice’ (New York Times, 2 October 2002). Similarly, from within Congress: ‘America is a unique nation ever in the history of the world. We have accepted responsibility for freedom, safety, dignity of




people other than ourselves’. And, ‘while erring and misjudging from time to time, [the United States] is on the right side of history’, even though ‘[t]here are others, American and foreign alike, who reject these contentions’ (Washington Post, 9 September 2002). Even where the activities and arguments of war opponents are commented upon, the discussion frequently leads to a relegitimation – freedom of expression and the possibility of manifesting dissent by way of protest activities then become evidence for the democratic quality of, or the rule of law in, the United States. In his State of the Union Address, for instance, Bush, Sr remarks somewhat condescendingly that ‘[d]emocracy brings the undeniable value of thoughtful dissent, and we’ve heard some dissenting voices here at home, some – a handful – reckless, most responsible. But the fact that all voices have the right to speak out is one of the reasons we’ve been united in purpose and principle for 200 years’ (New York Times, 30 January 1991). Especially in the international politics dimension, the nation state reasserts itself as a democracy, and hence as a legitimate political order, even on the side of war opponents. The two confrontations with Iraq put the existing democratic system in a more favourable light than was the case against the backdrop of debates on domestic policy issues. The contrast with the distant authoritarian regime all but removed the necessity to compare the match between norms and reality at home. After all, even dysfunctional democratic institutions, merely ‘formally’ democratic procedures, or the occasional abuse of democratic procedures still have a much more ‘democratic’ appearance than the overtly dictatorial arrangements and practices in other countries. The legitimacy of a self-critical democratic regime that puts itself to the test by establishing democratic input norms goes unquestioned as soon as it enters a conflict with a non-democratic order.

Summary The widely hypothesized legitimacy crisis allegedly induced by globalization does not seem to have occurred in any of its three possible forms. Not even a type III crisis, the legitimation of political orders on the basis of transformed – non-democratic – legitimation patterns, can be identified. Instead of the expected transformation in the direction of output (re)legitimation, non-democratic output patterns are often used to criticize the performance of democratic systems. This, however, is evened out by a high volume of liberal justifications centred around the protection of human rights. In view of the continuing relevance





of arguments that underline popular sovereignty and related aspects of democratic decision-making, we may conclude that liberal justifications of the nation state prevail. That state activities and governmental outputs contribute to the protection of civil liberties or even strengthen them (and this quite independently of the way decisions come about) represents a key argument of the supporters of democracy. Against the backdrop of a more ‘purist’ democratic theory, this may well be understood as a redefinition of the democratic nation state – a trend that would fit into a related tendency in the legitimation of international organizations. For at the global level, ‘human rights provide the sole recognized basis of legitimation for the politics of the international community’ (Habermas 1998: 162). Thus internationalization may foster not so much a legitimacy crisis of the nation state as an adaptation of the foundations of its legitimacy in line with the only criterion that appears to remain valid at the international level.



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Relegitimation Strategies: Countering Threats to the Legitimacy of Political Systems

Our central finding up to this point has been the continuing prominence of democratic forms of legitimation in the public spheres of the four political systems examined, notwithstanding some clearly identifiable threats to the democratic foundations of their legitimacy. All in all, the legitimacy of the democratic nation state appears to be solidly grounded in broadly supported anchor institutions; legitimation discourses, moreover, reveal a liberal bias with regard to the standards against which these core institutions and principles are evaluated – that is, with regard to the normative criteria on which support for them is based. In terms of methodology, these findings were derived from the coding of individual statements in accordance with our legitimation grammar, and from the interpretation of aggregate frequency distributions for each of its variables. However, we have already briefly discussed combinations of statements, notably in the previous chapter, where we pointed to the frequent use of comparative argumentations – that is, propositions in which two or more legitimation objects are evaluated together – in the four national legitimation discourses, and demonstrated that the inherent tension between legitimation patterns linked to human rights and popular sovereignty may be resolved in different ways. We will now further pursue this path of analysis, as it enables us to demonstrate that the surprising robustness of the democratic nation state’s legitimacy can to some extent be understood as the result of discursive strategies connecting two or more statements. The concept of discursive strategies complements the notions of legitimation styles, legitimacy anchors, and legitimation resources introduced above. The term ‘legitimation style’ denotes the specific 155 10.1057/9780230275331 - Democracy's Deep Roots, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner


5


configurations of legitimation objects and patterns referred to most frequently in each national discourse. The terms ‘anchor’ and ‘resource’ add the evaluative dimension, since these are the institutions or patterns referred to or used most frequently in public discourses while also displaying a clear legitimating tendency, and hence fostering the overall legitimacy of political systems. Finally, discursive strategies – as defined for our purposes – relate positive and negative evaluations to each other. In this chapter, we focus on strategies that are meant to relegitimate objects that have come under attack, and to ensure that in the long run positive assessments prevail over negative ones. Thus the relations between legitimation statements rather than individual evaluations or their aggregate numbers are of interest here. To get a hold on the interplay between various legitimation objects or patterns, and on the way in which this interplay may stabilize a regime’s legitimacy, the chapter sets out to identify types of relegitimation strategies and demonstrates how they manage to counter or gloss over critical evaluations. The first section outlines our rationale for this focus on textual strategies. The second establishes a basic threefold classification of relegitimation strategies and then discusses three more specific types that we call embedding, blame-shifting, and comparing. Finally, we explore some implications of our findings by reviewing several questions discussed earlier on in the book in terms of the relational strategies identified here. This will allow us to probe the effects of these strategies on the legitimacy of the democratic nation state.

Relations and relegitimation Why take the relational nature of legitimation discourses into account? We contend that propositions on the legitimacy of political systems or institutions frequently have the character of more complex argumentations that combine two or even more individual legitimation statements; the message of such complex argumentations is more than the sum of its parts. Each individual statement makes a point of its own, contributing a specific evaluation to the universe of legitimation discourses (or reiterating arguments that are already prevalent in these discourses). Coupling such statements, then, entails slight shifts in the meanings of these evaluations and adds a layer of meaning that may be overlooked when individual propositions are considered in isolation. Only when we recognize that the individual evaluations that make up such complex argumentations are related to one another are we able to grasp this additional, more encompassing meaning.



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To be sure, many articles contain no more than a single pertinent statement, such as ‘this country has an impressive democratic tradition’. Yet, in some cases, the proposition is followed by a second statement of a different kind. For instance, our example might continue as follows: ‘... but these past achievements have fallen into oblivion’. Or the next sentence might read: ‘... yet its judiciary is in a deplorable state’. Conversely, a delegitimating statement, such as ‘our political system is less and less effective’, may be followed by the claim that the given regime’s authorities ‘are held accountable to a degree unrivalled in any other country of the European Union’. In all these cases, two (and sometimes more) legitimacy assessments are related to each other to make a point and, ultimately, either to legitimate or to delegitimate the regime as a whole by way of these more complex evaluative argumentations. All in all, some 36 per cent of the articles in our monitoring corpus for the year 2004 contain two or more legitimation statements, which may or may not be linked together in relational argumentations – whether such discursive relations are indeed established or whether the individual propositions remain disconnected is a different matter that can only be discerned upon closer inspection. In what follows, we are not concerned with all kinds of relational strategies that might be detected in these articles. Of course, both legitimizers and delegitimizers make use of discursive strategies. However, in the face of surprisingly high levels of discursive support in the examined national legitimation discourses, a focus on relegitimating strategies – the counter-moves with which a regime’s supporters react to initial attacks from the delegitimating camp – seems appropriate. Hence we concentrate on discursive contributions that react to delegitimating statements and try to counter them. These inherently relational argumentations are intended to have legitimating effects; we therefore call them relegitimation strategies. A terminological clarification is in order here. In the previous chapters, we used the term legitimation, as opposed to delegitimation. When using the term relegitimation, we refer to legitimating statements that explicitly react to prior delegitimating statements. Before addressing the basic structure of relegitimating strategies, we should be clear about when precisely they come into the picture. As long as no legitimacy-related debate has flared up, and hence as long as no substantial amount of criticism related to the institutions and principles of the democratic nation state has been voiced, there is obviously no need for relegitimation. The taken-for-grantedness of political authority is mirrored in apathy – as indicated by a complete lack or very low intensity of legitimacy-related communication – and in the effectiveness of ritualistic



Relegitimation Strategies

legitimation practices (a term that we use for instances of legitimation that begin with positive assessments, often in the wake of political rituals such as parliamentary opening ceremonies or presidential addresses). In such cases, the ensuing legitimation statements generally do not result in a sustained debate but remain isolated occurrences. Statements of this type do not spring up in times of crisis but are uttered – as the term ‘ritual’ implies – in a highly conventionalized manner, often in set phrases, with hardly any reference to ongoing debates, and typically unaccompanied by other legitimation statements. The issue of legitimation is addressed here, but legitimacy does not really seem to be at stake. These statements are nevertheless important, since they contribute to a constant groundswell of positive evaluations in public discourses. Delegitimating communication, in turn, arises, develops, and fades in legitimacy attention cycles, a concept introduced in Chapter 3. It comes to the fore when particular triggering events point to deficiencies that are seen as so fundamental that they cannot simply be blamed on specific policies or actors, and hence generate communication about the quality of political systems or institutions – that is, genuine legitimation debates. When a large number of delegitimating statements enter the public sphere, it becomes apparent that the foundations of a regime’s legitimacy have become precarious and are in need of repair. Yet we observed that such attacks and debates tend to come and go, following the inherent logic of media coverage. Hence we concluded that the short-lived nature of media interest alone to some extent shields the democratic nation state from many potentially serious threats to its legitimacy. What is more, it is not problematic per se that delegitimating evaluations are voiced or that positive and negative arguments are exchanged in the public sphere. A certain amount of criticism and debate might indeed be taken as a sign of democratic health. Things only get serious when an overwhelming share of evaluations assess a given institution or principle negatively, and over a sustained period of time. In what follows, we are concerned with relegitimating strategies surfacing during particular legitimacy attention cycles, and to which speakers resort when more serious crisis tendencies become apparent. What, then, is the basic structure of relegitimation strategies (Table 5.1)? First, there is what one might call the simple mode. When a core institution has been harshly criticized, a straightforward denial of the alleged shortcomings might be the first choice of the relegitimation camp. If the American electoral system had, for instance, been condemned as unfair in the wake of the 2000 presidential election in the United States and the ensuing weeks of legal manoeuvring between




Relegitimation Strategies Table 5.1

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Modes of relegitimation

Object

… same

… different

… same

Simple mode

Pattern-switching relegitimation

… different

Object-switching relegitimation

Complex mode

George W. Bush and Al Gore, the rebuttal would simply have been that the system was, in fact, fair. The delegitimating and relegitimating statements joined together in such instances thus refer to the same legitimation object and draw on the same evaluation standard. In a more sophisticated mode, the relegitimation might still refer to the same object but employ a different legitimation pattern; we call this a pattern-switching relegitimation. For example, direct democracy might be criticized as time-consuming but relegitimated with reference to the superior quality of the decisions it yields – for instance, in terms of stability. A third mode of relegitimation, finally, sticks to the same pattern but switches to another object; this will be referred to as object-switching relegitimation. For example, the political elites of a country might be accused of resorting more and more to back-room dealing, but the judiciary might at the same time be portrayed as guaranteeing the highest standard of transparency in politics. The most complex mode of relegitimation, obviously, is the one that employs different legitimation objects and patterns from those addressed in the delegitimating statement to which it is responding. The table shows all four possibilities of linking relegitimating statements with delegitimating ones. As important as the simple mode might be in reality, there is not much to say about it, and so we will not consider it in our analysis, concentrating instead on more sophisticated strategies of relegitimation. What the remaining strategies have in common is the fact that they lend themselves to hierarchical ordering: once patterns used or objects assessed are different, one can be portrayed as more important than the other, or as superior. The notion of object hierarchies has already been introduced above (Chapter 3) and plays a role in the examination of discursive strategies as well; a similar hierarchical ordering may be employed in the coupling of legitimation patterns.



Pattern


How relevant are the remaining three strategies? Out of all articles containing at least two legitimation statements, 16 per cent combine delegitimating and legitimating statements in one and the same paragraph.1 This is rather a modest proportion, and we will refrain from reporting frequency distributions related to this segment of the four national legitimation discourses. But why should we care at all about these articles and argumentations, given that they are so rare? The reason is that they arguably play a key role in cushioning the legitimacy challenges represented by peaks in delegitimating communication. Our study has already shown under which circumstances and in which events or issue contexts legitimation debates are more likely to occur. Their emergence and petering out have been described using the concept of legitimacy attention cycles. In addition to the logic of media coverage underlying those cycles, the analysis of discursive strategies enables us to gain a more nuanced understanding of what is happening during phases of heightened delegitimation. The question is simple: how is legitimacy secured in times of accumulated critical evaluations, or, to put it differently, how are emerging crisis tendencies – as well as threats and dangers below the threshold of a fullblown legitimacy crisis – coped with in public communication? In the remainder of this chapter, we identify three strategies that frequently serve to relegitimate core principles and institutions of the democratic nation state. Each of these strategies follows a stylized structural logic of argument/counter-argument, that is, negative evaluation/positive evaluation. In this structural form, relegitimation can be taken as a textual strategy. In modification of Eco’s (1992) ‘textual intention’ (intentio operis), we conceive of a textual strategy as a conventionalized and evaluative form of arguing that a ‘model reader’ is able to decipher. 2 Accordingly, there is no need to attribute such a structural form of relegitimation to an author’s intention in each and every case – the argumentative form as such is sufficient to speak of a (textual) strategy. 3

Three strategies of relegitimation This section elaborates on the three relegitimation strategies that were identified inductively. It is helpful to start with the theoretical idea of relations being based on differences. A short typological exercise helps us to delineate the most basic types of relations that might be expected empirically when turning to matters of relegitimation.



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Relations are based on differences – differences which allow the establishment of a relation of disparate entities in the first place, and which are at the same time constructed and reproduced through this very relation. Theoretically, discourse can be seen as a set of constantly produced differences in an interplay of ever-shifting differences. With a particular issue at hand – legitimacy in our case – one might nevertheless ask which particular type of difference is being established. To distinguish three fundamental patterns, we turn to excerpts from our material. When the US presidential election in 2000 triggered several weeks of stalemate, with uncertainty over who would become the next president, Al Gore or George W. Bush, this did not only invite worldwide mockery. In the United States itself, technical aspects of the vote-counting procedures, the election system as such, and the Electoral College in particular also attracted a good deal of criticism. Such delegitimation is alluded to in the following statement: ‘The greatest nation on earth should have a voting system that is not arbitrary ...’ (New York Times, 29 November 2000). The arbitrariness of the electoral system is conceded but not taken as emblematic of American democracy, nor is it generalized in any other way. On the contrary, this particular shortcoming is strongly contextualized by reference to ‘the greatest nation on earth’, which is a massive relegitimation. By introducing this highly valued object, the target of the original delegitimation (the electoral system) is itself identified as part of something larger, ‘the greatest nation’, thereby dampening the ferocity of the attack. Broadly speaking, the relation between the positively and negatively evaluated legitimation objects is one of approximation. Let us consider a second instance, namely, a statement in the wake of a failed referendum in Switzerland on pension policies: Is direct democracy truly beyond repair? ... . Direct democracy permits successful reforms if it is confronted with genuine reform proposals. ... Parliament and government should at last have the courage to present reform initiatives to the people that actually deserve this name. (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 15 June 2004)4 The text alludes to allegations that direct-democratic procedures lack efficiency and problem-solving capacity, and yet direct democracy is discharged from this liability. Instead, the delegitimation shifts to other objects that are held responsible for the standstill in the area of pension policies. The delegitimating statement refers entirely to these objects and is clearly disconnected and isolated from what was initially the



Discursive relations


focus of attack. Again, in simplified terms, the relation between the negatively and positively evaluated legitimation objects is rather loose, and both (groups of) objects are clearly separated from each other. The third and last example is taken from the British 1992 election campaign, in which questions of institutional reform, and especially proportional representation, were of major importance: Some countries abroad look enviously at Britain’s electoral system. The decisiveness which attracts them arises from a long tradition of single-party majority government in Britain. It is, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the least worst democratic system in the world. (Times, 9 April 1992) The speaker’s own nation (Britain) on the one hand and (unspecified) other nations on the other are put in relation to each other here. With reference to a long-standing tradition, a constitutive difference is postulated: single-party government. This established difference is then translated into a comparative statement leading to the relegitimation of the British system. These three sketches of interpretation already enable us to delineate three basic patterns of relational statements: the relation between two legitimation statements may be based either on minimizing difference, on maximizing difference, or on fixing difference. Connecting the electoral system to a depiction of the nation as ‘the greatest on earth’ can be said to be minimizing the difference between the object that is delegitimated and another that is held in high esteem. The opposite is true in the Swiss case. Here relegitimation relies on maximizing the difference between two objects: one that is to be shielded against criticism and another that has to bear the brunt of the delegitimating statement. The third case of fixing differences is illustrated by the British example.5 This relegitimation presupposes other political entities that are presented as clearly distinct from one’s own before joining them together in a comparative evaluation. The minimizing, maximizing, and fixing of differences in relational statements thus constitute three basic types of relegitimating strategies. However, this typological set of how to deal with differences would be of little use if we were not able to detect corresponding discursive interventions repeatedly. The following subsections no longer deduce strategies but identify and analyse empirical cases of relegitimation – embedding (corresponding to minimizing differences), blame-shifting (the equivalent of maximizing differences), and comparing (fixing differences). In doing so, the goal is not to delve into the details of particular issues or to



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offer policy narratives. Instead, and in the spirit of Albert O. Hirschman’s (1991) identification of three basic conservative strategies in his Rhetoric of Reaction (namely, ‘perversity’, ‘futility’, and ‘jeopardy’), the inherent logic of each strategy is unfolded and subtypes are specified.

Embedding is an elaborate relegitimation strategy based on an object hierarchy like the one introduced above (Chapter 3). It works by playing out this hierarchy empirically in discursive relations, not bluntly denying but cushioning critical evaluations. In what follows, we will for illustrative purposes stay with the 2000 presidential election in the United States as our primary example, albeit not exclusively so. Since our aim is to understand how relegitimation strategies work in times of heightened delegitimation, this globally observed incident, which had all the potential ingredients of a full-blown legitimacy crisis, is a particularly useful example. Not only did the electoral system in general and the Electoral College in particular attract much criticism, but also the Supreme Court, federalism, the constitution, and the political system as a whole. The election process also came under attack with regard to the treatment of ethnic minorities. Embedding as a relational strategy of relegitimation is brought into play when a second institution or principle is invoked in order to contain and mitigate the initial delegitimating statement. This additional statement then refers to an institution or principle that is clearly evaluated in a positive sense: ‘We are far too stable and dedicated a democracy to fear the consequences of a delay of at most a few weeks’ (Washington Post, 10 November 2000); ‘... the world’s most powerful democracy needs to figure out a better way to vote for president’ (New York Times, 11 November 2000). A first feature of embedding is clearly discernible here. Obviously, a malfunction is conceded and its critical evaluation is not bluntly rejected, but in both cases ‘democracy’ is invoked, serving as a hierarchically superior object compared with the electoral system. The latter’s delegitimation is completely overshadowed by the massive relegitimation of American democracy in claims such as ‘far too stable and dedicated a democracy’ or the ‘world’s most powerful democracy’. Of course, condemnation of the electoral system’s shortcomings as proof that the American political system as a whole is undemocratic would be equally viable. Yet this is precisely what is not happening here. Instead of an escalation of delegitimating assessments, we witness de-escalation by way of embedding criticism within a decidedly positive evaluation of American democracy. Generally



Embedding


speaking, this strategy is based on the existence of anchor institutions as introduced above, that is, institutions or principles not only at the top of the object hierarchy, as defined theoretically, but also frequently referred to in statements that affirm their object’s legitimacy. However, embedding is not only characterized by its use of the legitimation hierarchy. A second feature of the strategy is its tendency to refer to non-performance-based institutions and principles when relational statements are made. For example, an actual vote count is more easily denounced as unjust than American democracy as such. Accordingly, objects such as the political community as a whole, but also non-performance-based legitimation criteria such as those relating to the nation’s standing in the world (alluded to by using terms like ‘powerful’, ‘great’, and the like), are readily incorporated into a relegitimation strategy, since they can be put forward without requiring extensive justification. By contrast, patterns such as justice or efficiency lend themselves to evaluations in which the actual degree of realization or the actual performance is assessed. Indeed, a handful of institutions and principles which are hardly performance-based tend to be used for this kind of embedding strategy. This is true not only for our case studies but also for the articles in the monitoring corpus. Most notably in the United States, some institutions and principles enjoy clearly above-average legitimacy levels: the regime as such, democracy, constitutionalism, and the political community, all of which are more readily evaluated by using nonperformance-based criteria. It is precisely institutions and principles such as these that are referred to in relational discursive strategies of the embedding type. In addition to these two main features, playing out the legitimating hierarchy and relying on non-performance-based criteria, two more specific subtypes of the strategy can be identified, both of which are temporal in character. The first type might be called historical idealization. Here critical evaluations are embedded in a relegitimation of institutions and principles as traditionally derived and historically dignified. The issue which prompted a delegitimating debate is presented as a lapse or an exception to a historical rule, an issue which by no means calls into question the traditional, ongoing value of these institutions and principles. The following is a case in point: [T]here had always remained one beacon of hope and belief: the election process itself. Whatever our political leaders did, however much



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our political institutions may have been compromised, the ultimate authority rested with the people through the exercise of the vote. The vote was holy. When one entered the voting booth with a pencil (or, as we now know, a stylus), pulled the curtain and cast a ballot, one was entering the real cathedral of democracy. Here it was simple again. You made your choice. Your choice was registered. The candidate with the most votes took office. The Republic endured ... . (New York Times, 10 December 2000) After criticism uttered in the wake of the 2000 presidential election has been taken up, this particular event is then strongly recontextualized. The author evokes the historically successful tradition of American democracy. Not only is popular sovereignty called upon (‘the ultimate authority rested with the people’) but, in addition, the election process itself is framed in religious terms and given a sacred aura: ‘entering the real cathedral of democracy’. The act of voting is clearly separated from the developments in December 2000 which led to all the (temporary) criticism, and instead connected to an idealized historical notion of democracy and the election process. It is in cases like these that the process of embedding by minimizing differences is most explicit. Bringing the initially delegitimated object (the election process) in close proximity to objects like ‘democracy’ and ‘republic’ creates a kind of legitimating spillover in the sense that one object shares the higher esteem of a second object. This resembles the psychological mechanism called ‘anchoring’ by Tversky and Kahneman (1974). They discovered that decisions under uncertainty are conditional upon some initial judgement and vary according to the nature or thrust of that judgement. This psychological mechanism of ‘hooking and binding’ can also be seen at work in relational legitimation strategies, and hence at the level of discursive judgements. The highly positive evaluation of core institutions and principles, then, may lead to an equally positive evaluation of initially delegitimated objects brought together with such anchors, or at least a more positive evaluation than would have been the case without such hooking and binding. While the described idealization of anchor institutions is inherently historical, the emphasis of the second specific subtype of embedding is placed on the possibility of continuous remedy. We call this reflexive adaptation. The delegitimating element of the argumentation is presented as embedded within a stable political process or system which




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We have become complacent with our model democracy, and thus sloppy in the execution of elections. Rather than clinging to an inefficient, corrupted system, I welcome the movement to expose outdated procedures, rotten ballots and inept monitors. Too many Americans have been denied the representation guaranteed them because of technical problems or human error. If our democracy is as durable as I believe it to be, the country will only benefit from a robust examination of the electoral system. (New York Times, 13 November 2000) While being very explicit about the shortcomings revealed in the course of the presidential election, the author finally, in the last sentence, reverses this critical perspective by appealing to the self-healing qualities of American democracy. In this vein, the final shift in power to George W. Bush is taken as evidence for the strength of the ‘greatest democracy on earth’: Washington is Washington: the apparatus of government is still in place, skilled politicians and career civil servants still keep things running, and ultimately nothing apocalyptic is likely to happen. (New York Times, 20 January 2001) Here the relegitimation – after weeks of stalemate – is justified by the claim that the political system has never ceased to function properly and was not profoundly affected by the post-election developments. In fact, the argument can be read as if there were not even any need for improvement. At the heart of the matter is not some sort of reaction to a crisis (which a ‘robust examination of the electoral system’ certainly would be) but a more or less continuous political process which is well capable of absorbing the whole uproar. Generally, such discursive references to an anchor object as being hierarchically superior rather than performance-based might be more or less explicit, and hence more or less effective. Take the following example: These are days of shame for the United States. No one writing a civics text for American high school students would recommend this kind of behavior for a great and mighty nation. We have to figure out a way to extricate ourselves from Iraq and rebuild a truly representative



itself is deemed to be the cure for crisis symptoms that are otherwise frankly acknowledged:


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The relegitimation part clearly resides in the words ‘a great and mighty nation’. However, the criticism is harsh and the allusion to the nation’s attributes provides little relief. It might even be read as not cushioning the accusation at all but reinforcing it by pointing to the gap between ideal and reality, thus providing a neat example for the additional layers of meaning that the interpretation of two or more evaluative statements ‘in context’ might reveal. In the following citation, the embedding strategy is made abundantly clear in a metareflexive commentary: But then Ms. Heinz Kerry, who was born in Mozambique to European parents, has also consistently leavened her harsher opinions with a sugary serenade to America – its democracy, its can-do spirit – that might be laughed away as cornball if it were not delivered by a selfdescribed ‘daughter of Africa’ who grew up in a dictatorship. (New York Times, 22 February 2004) What is aptly noted here by the commentator constitutes the very strategy of embedding one frequently comes across. While in this case the strategy is attributed to a single actor who is both raising criticism and immediately addressing it herself, such embedding techniques are frequently used to tone down harsh evaluations that have been promoted by others and are in need of a little softening. So far we have come across the complex mode of relegitimation, in which not only the object but also the legitimation pattern is switched in order to take the edge off a delegitimation statement. A simplified formulation of the statement reveals the following underlying logic: ‘the election process might have been unfair, but our democracy is the most enduring on earth’, or put more abstractly: ‘a is x (delegitimation) but b is y (relegitimation)’. Drawing on a new legitimation pattern while sticking to the object of criticism constitutes a particular mode of relegitimation which we called pattern-switching relegitimation. It is based on a hierarchy of legitimation patterns instead of a hierarchy of objects as above, and it relies on the fact that virtually every institution can be praised or denounced on various grounds. In order to relegitimate a legitimation object, then, a set of two or more criteria is called upon, acknowledging shortcomings in one dimension but embedding them into merits in other dimensions which are said to outweigh these shortcomings.



democracy here at home. Right now we have a mess on both fronts. (New York Times, 1 November 2004)


For instance, another typical argument put forward in the debate on the 2000 US presidential election concedes a lack of effectiveness (‘not perfect’) but tries to outweigh this by switching to the pattern of credibility and fairness, which enhances the acceptability of the current electoral system: ‘We have a bona fide voting system in place for years ... . Like it or not, it isn’t perfect. Mistakes are made. However, the mistakes balance out for both parties’ (New York Times, 22 November 2000). Like the other strategies, this one is found in all four examined countries. A more elaborate version was identified in the Swiss material: True, strong plebiscitary slow down the process of political decision making but they also prevent acts of defiance by the democratic sovereign. Thus they generate political stability. (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 19 September 2001)6 The widespread criticism of time-consuming processes, and hence a lack of efficiency, is frankly recognized, but more important advantages are ultimately highlighted in this and similar argumentations: moderation in decision-making, the participation of different stakeholders, and the stability of the political system in general. To put it in abstract terms again, this mode of relegitimation reads as follows: ‘a is x (delegitimation) but above all y (relegitimation)’. To sum up, the American presidential election and other heated debates in the United States (for instance, on the Abu Ghraib scandal), as well as similar debates in other countries, are frequently accompanied by the embedding strategy. In most cases, the triggering events prompted an extraordinary amount of delegitimating communication. Embedding constitutes an immediate reaction to such challenges. Hence we contend that for the embedding strategy to be triggered it must be preceded by a massive delegitimation of core institutions and values. Public debates like these, in which not only policy issues are at stake and which are characterized by a great volume of criticism, may indeed jeopardize the legitimacy of the democratic nation state. Embedding, to conclude, works as a coping strategy in such moments of severe tensions and legitimacy challenges. Blame-shifting The embedding strategy depends on the discursive availability of anchor objects and patterns (legitimation resources), which we defined as objects and patterns that are both referred to frequently and usually evaluated positively or employed in an affirmative sense. The complex



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mode, in which both objects and patterns are switched to counter delegitimation and turn them into an overall relegitimating argumentation, is employed most often. To a lesser degree, embedding relies on switching the anchor pattern alone. As we will see, the opposite is true for blame-shifting, which is the next strategy to be presented. The complex mode is not as prevalent here, and blame-shifting typically relies on switching the anchor object in the move from delegitimation to relegitimation (object-switching relegitimation). As detailed in Chapter 3, such widely supported legitimacy anchors can be found in each of the four countries under study. Yet in the United Kingdom these anchors are considerably less prominent, while in the United States a handful of such anchors to a large extent account for the overall high legitimacy levels in this country. While Britain and the United States strongly differ from each other in this respect, Germany and Switzerland are characterized by the existence of a single, highly dominant anchor institution: the Basic Law (constitution) in Germany and direct democracy in Switzerland. Take the following evaluation of the latter: There is one value that continues to be shared almost unanimously: the belief in the meaningfulness of direct democracy. It is a massive force of integration. We still accept the outcomes of referenda without complaining – even when we find ourselves in the minority. Direct democracy is the only institution that is not affected by value conflicts. (Tagesanzeiger, 16 April 2004)7 This is a massive, unconditional discursive legitimation of that particular democratic institution, which nicely mirrors our aggregate findings (Chapter 3). Overall, (direct) democracy attracts 60 per cent of positive evaluations, more than any other institution or regime principle in Switzerland with the exception of constitutionalism (72.7 per cent). However, and contrary to the claim put forward in the last quotation, we should take into account the possibility that such an anchor could nevertheless become the object of delegitimating tendencies – which would be all the worse if the overall legitimacy of a regime indeed hinges massively on high public esteem for its anchor institutions. The following excerpt is a case in point: A study by the ‘Avenir Suisse’ think tank endeavours to identify the causes of Switzerland’s lacklustre economic growth and of the reform gridlock from which it stems. According to the authors, Switzerland





Borrowing from a different line of research, we call the relegitimation strategy that reacts to such challenges ‘blame avoidance’ (Weaver 1986). It seeks to deflect the delegitimating assessment to other, more marginal institutions and regime principles in an effort to shelter the anchor from discursive attacks, whereas embedding works by minimizing the difference between two objects, making one object partake of another’s undisputed legitimacy. The example of the Swiss pension reform and its rejection in a referendum has already been used to illustrate the underlying logic of blameshifting, namely, a process of maximizing the difference between two legitimation objects, one being highly valued and the other being denigrated. After the Swiss people rejected the proposed reform, the debate turned away from policies to principles and institutions, lamenting the gridlock that events had presumably made apparent. Since the proposal was supported by all sides of the political spectrum, the obvious reaction would have been to blame the institution of direct democracy as such. However, this happened very rarely. Instead, the institution of direct democracy was explicitly exempted from criticism, which instead was typically directed at political elites – the government, parliament, or the parties, all of whom were accused of not having delivered a sound, convincing proposal. Just as we focused on the US presidential election for the empirical illustration of embedding, we now draw on the Swiss case and direct democracy to make our point. Let us recall our earlier example, which we used to elaborate on the maximization of difference: Is direct democracy truly beyond repair? Can this be read into the triple ‘no’ of last weekend’s referendum? I warn against premature conclusions. Having grown up in a canton with particularly strong grassroots institutions [Landsgemeinde], I deeply trust direct democracy. ... If reforms are proposed, they should be truly capable of solving problems. ... But what should come next in the political arena? ... (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 15 June 2004)9 This statement was made in the context of the failed referendum initiative. It starts by questioning the effectiveness of direct democracy but immediately turns to an affirmation of support for this institution, finally blaming parliament and the executive for having presented only



suffers from too much of the Swiss institutions of federalism, consociationalism, and direct democracy. (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 6 March 2004)8

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inconsistent proposals. Here we see a full-blown three-step argument making use of the strategy of blame-shifting: initial (rhetorical) delegitimation of the anchor – relegitimation of the anchor – delegitimation of other objects instead. This stepwise implementation of the strategy is not often exhibited so succinctly. But basic elements of this discursive blueprint are often detectable: ‘The gridlock currently observed at the federal level is not the sovereign’s [that is, the people’s] fault and does not amount to a crisis of direct democracy. It has to do with the way in which the parties assume their responsibilities’ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1 July 2004).10 Here the anchor’s delegitimation (gridlock as a crisis indicator due to direct democracy) is alluded to briefly, only to be rejected the very next moment (gridlock does not indicate a crisis of direct democracy), instantaneously followed by a discursive manoeuvre that totally shifts the blame for the perceived lack of effectiveness to the political parties. In general, the parliament and executive, parties, and specialinterest groups are suitable institutions to which blame can be shifted. Accordingly, blame-shifting, just like embedding, is based on the hierarchy of legitimation objects but works precisely the other way round. Thus, while with embedding, critically evaluated but inferior objects participate in the higher esteem of hierarchically superior objects, with blame-shifting, inferior objects are called upon to work off the anchor’s delegitimation. The secondary objects are given the blame; the pattern of (de)legitimation (for instance, ‘efficiency’) is not changed, but it is applied to different objects, in the mode of object-switching relegitimation. Again, in a stylized version, this mode can be simplified as ‘not a is x (relegitimation of a) but b is x (delegitimation of b)’. One final but crucial remark relating to the established use of the term ‘blame avoidance’ is in order, namely, that this shift constitutes a downward shift in the legitimation hierarchy. Notwithstanding such more or less elaborate attempts at shifting the force of delegitimating assessments away from the core of a regime in public discourses, their success is not easily secured. One major obstacle here is that a single national anchor, such as direct democracy in Switzerland, might well be normatively uncontested at a general level but easily denounced on grounds of low performance when particular policies are taken into account. Upon closer inspection, it is exactly in this respect that the section’s initial quotations differ: on the one hand, there is an institution that everybody values (‘there is one value that continues to be shared almost unanimously: the belief in the meaningfulness of direct democracy’); on the other hand, low economic growth





is attributed precisely to this valued institution (‘a study by the “Avenir Suisse” think tank endeavours to identify the causes of Switzerland’s lacklustre economic growth and of the reform gridlock from which it stems; according to the authors, Switzerland suffers from too much of the Swiss institutions of federalism, consociationalism, and direct democracy’). Hence it is mainly owing to a lack of efficiency or to low effectiveness in problem-solving that direct democracy comes under attack, or, more generally, observable performance measures in the context of particular policies constitute the Achilles’ heel of otherwise normatively uncontested anchors. This observation corresponds to the overall assessment of our case studies with regard to specific policies (Chapter 3). Delegitimating tendencies have been shown to be less intense in the context of institutional reforms as such, but to increase sharply when particular policies (social and economic policies in our cases) are addressed, affecting anchors as well. A softer variety of blame-shifting may also be identified, namely, blame-sharing. It is exemplified by the following statement, in which it is ‘not only’ direct democracy but organised interest groups as well (one might read: in particular) that account for the standstill of economic and social reform: ‘The procedures of direct democracy alone can’t be blamed for reform gridlock. The power and influence of interest groups that manage to defend the status quo against any changes are at least as much to blame’ (Tagesanzeiger, 25 May 2004).11 Thus the twofold discursive move of relegitimating the anchor on the one hand, and delegitimating a stand-in institution on the other, is not always completed. In some instances, blame-shifting only amounts to sharing the blame. The respective arguments are quite sophisticated at times: No lowering of taxes, even less so a tax hike, and no modest reform of old-age security either. Nothing goes any more. For the second time in a year the people have soundly rejected proposals of the government and parliament. In other countries, such a massive vote of non-confidence on the current economic and social policies would have forced a change of government. Not so in Switzerland, with its semi-direct democracy and consociational government, because such a change of government would not improve things in our system. No matter whether taxes, social benefits, traffic or housing and property issues are concerned, there is less and less willingness to develop solutions that find majority support. The Swiss reform



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gridlock in core policy fields is blatantly clear. References to unbalanced and badly negotiated ballot packages alone do not solve this gridlock. Governance in a consociational system must once again become more than an uncompromising effort to satisfy particular interests and to maximize vote shares. (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 17 May 2004)12 Here, the delegitimation is openly addressed (gridlock by way of referendum due to massive public distrust). Although such referendums constitute the core feature of direct democracy, named in one breath with consociationalism, the delegitimation statement is watered down by relegating the effects of direct democracy (and thereby this very institution as well) to the realm of the inalterable: ‘system-inherent’. Instead, it is again the political parties that are brought into play and condemned for not observing the public good. And in a very similar vein: There will only be a chance to break through the gridlock if the insight is successfully propagated that the majority of the population must make and accept decisions that might be negative and even painful in the short term but necessary to protect their long-term interests; this is no different in a direct or representative democracy. If at all, the majority principle rather than direct democracy impedes reforms because majorities will always attempt to defend their ‘due’ by all means. (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 29 May 2004)13 In both cases, blame-sharing goes hand-in-hand with the complex mode of relegitimation, involving more than one object and legitimation pattern at the same time: it is not so much that direct democracy is inefficient in itself; rather, powerful groups are not committed to the public good. Again translated into a stylized version: ‘a might be x, but b is y (delegitimation)’ – without this softening, and as a clear shift of blame instead of mere blame-sharing, the complex mode would take the form: ‘a is not x (relegitimation), but b is y (delegitimation)’. To sum up, in the previous chapters we described anchor institutions as enjoying high legitimacy and thus preventing an all-out erosion of regime support. But how their existence and role are constantly renegotiated and reproduced is discernible only when one analyses those key institutions in their discursive relations to other institutions. It is here that we see the process of blame-shifting at work, by which anchor institutions are permanently moved out of the focus of criticism and delegitimation is attributed to a stand-in institution. By thus




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Democracy’s Deep Roots Table 5.2 Types of relegitimation strategies

Object

… same

… different

… same

Simple mode

‘a is x but above all y’

… different

‘a is not x but b is x’

‘a is x but b is y’ ‘a is not (might be) x but b is y’

Note: Dark grey – embedding; light gray – blame shifting.

sheltering anchors from critical evaluation and shifting the blame (at least partly) to marginal institutions or a specific set of patterns, the strategy of blame-shifting constantly works to stabilize such anchors, which in turn are needed to secure the overall legitimacy of political systems. Finally, it might be worth pointing out that the strategies of embedding and blame-shifting often work in comparable but opposite ways, with the former strategy based on minimizing and the latter on maximizing differences, the former elevating objects in the object hierarchy and the latter pushing them down. Whereas embedding works particularly well in a complex mode or the pattern-switching mode, blameshifting relies on the object-shifting mode of relegitimation and on the complex mode as well. Again using the stylized version of each argument, both strategies can be summarized in a matrix (Table 5.2). Comparing Both embedding and blame-shifting relate national institutions and regime principles to each other in order to mitigate delegitimating tendencies. The former strategy allows the targeted institution to share the undisputed legitimacy of anchor objects. With the latter strategy, blame-shifting, the anchor in danger of being delegitimated is put in sharp contrast to other objects as stand-in institutions which have to bear the brunt of expressed criticism. A third strategy, to which we turn now, works with fixed relations, namely, between different political entities and their respective



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institutions and principles. It presupposes a clear distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between ‘our’ and ‘their’ democracy (or whatever institution is at stake), and attributes legitimacy to an institution by comparing it with its counterpart in another regime. Unlike the preceding strategies, however, the hierarchy of legitimation objects is not an issue in the context of comparing. The reason is simply that one relates more or less similar objects to each other and judges them in terms of a specified criterion. This is how former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher employed the strategy of comparing: The fundamental issue that will confront the Government at Maastricht is that the draft treaties propose an enormous and, to me, unacceptable transfer of responsibility from this House which is clearly accountable to the British people, to a European Community and institutions which are not. (Guardian, 21 November 1991) The judgement made here is about accountability as a democratic value, which is said to be fulfilled in the United Kingdom (the House of Commons being accountable to the people) but not by the European Union and its institutions. Although it is not specifically the European parliament (as one might expect) that is compared to the British parliament in terms of accountability, the relation is clearly horizontal – two political entities and their institutions – but not vertical in the sense of a hierarchy of legitimation objects. Even if institutions are compared that do not exactly mirror each other in terms of activities or functions, their hierarchy does not come to the fore, given the prominence of the dimension of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The strategy of comparing, just like the other two strategies, can be employed in response to delegitimating tendencies but might turn out to have a delegit imating spin as well, as illustrated below. We trace this strategy in the United Kingdom, where the overall level of delegitimation is the highest, namely, 66 per cent. In Great Britain, delegitimation surfaced time and again in the context of constitutional reform debates during the 1990s, with peak periods in the election campaigns of 1992 and 1997. Issues ranged from devolution, proportional representation, and the abolition of the House of Lords to the introduction of a written constitution or at least a charter of human rights, and to the passing of a Freedom of Information Act. Whereas Labour and the Liberal Democrats harshly criticized the status quo, the Tories’ election campaigns concentrated on extolling





the institutions in place. Given this well-publicized difference between the parties as well as the heightened attention customarily devoted to political issues in pre-election periods, we rarely see combinations of delegitimating and relegitimating statements in one and the same article: The opponents’ position is well known and taken into account, but their arguments are only referred to implicitly. Take the 1997 Tory election manifesto, in which the status quo is legitimated by comparing it with other European countries: Alone in Europe, the history of the United Kingdom has been one of stability and security. We owe much of that to the strength and stability of our constitution – the institutions, laws and traditions that bind us together as a nation. Our constitution has been stable, but not static. It has been woven over the centuries – the product of hundreds of years of knowledge, experience and history. Radical changes that alter the whole character of our constitutional balance could unravel what generations of our predecessors have created. To preserve that stability in future – and the freedoms and rights of our citizens – we need to continue a process of evolution, not revolution. (Conservative Manifesto 1997) It is only by way of the terms ‘radical changes’ and ‘revolution’ that the opponents’ proposals for institutional reforms are alluded to. The important thing to note here with regard to strategy is the multiple, all-embracing comparison: comparison not only with a single country but with virtually all European countries; not merely in the present or at a given point in time but throughout the centuries; grounded not in the evaluation of a specific institution but with regard to the entire set of institutions and regime principles of the democratic nation state. The core achievement of the institutional set-up of Britain – stability – is mentioned no less than four times. All in all, this constitutes a massive, forceful relegitimation. As we recognize, there do not seem to exist many restrictions with regard to the objects that might be compared or the specific ways of doing so, and so it comes as no surprise that this strategy is ubiquitous. Even in the context of purely national debates – such as the British debates on constitutional reform – the strategy proves helpful for those eager to relegitimate the status quo. The strategy comes in several variants as well, distinguishable not by the type of comparison that is made but by the object of reference: the delegitimation statement refers either to particular nations or to a



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defined group of countries, such as the Commonwealth nations or the member states of the EU, or to supranational entities like the EU and the WTO. It is worth noting that this strategy, unlike the other two, also comes in a frequently used delegitimating version, which accentuates negative evaluations of domestic institutions by comparing them with institutions abroad, or at the international level. Take the following characterization of the British constitution as outdated: The government regards Charter 88’s proposals for constitutional renewal, in Mr Patten’s words, as ‘false shadows’. But they are not shadowy to other Commonwealth democracies, such as Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand, which have successfully modernised their systems in many of the above respects. (Times, 12 February 1992) Such a delegitimating statement can also be achieved via comparisons that refer to a group of other nations like the Commonwealth or the members of the Council of Europe – which is, indeed, the most common variant. In the following excerpt, a very specific criterion, namely, the protection of human rights, is used to assess differences in legitimacy in the same manner: Mr. Robert Maclennan (Liberal Democrats, Caithness and Sutherland): We stand alone in Europe – the only country among the members of the Council of Europe which does not offer ... a fundamental protection [of human rights] in the form of a basic law which may be used to strike down the action or abuse of power by Ministers, public authorities or even Parliament itself. (House of Commons, 12 February 1992) But the criterion and the reference object do not always have to be so clear-cut in order to work as a delegitimating statement: The Liberal Democrats, Charter 88 and thoughtful politicians of the Labour and Conservative parties know what Britain lacks: a written constitution, which limits the power of the rulers; a catalogue of basic rights, an independent constitutional court, an independent central bank, federal structures and a new law on the vote. Measured by its constitution, Britain has become like a developing country. (Times, 3 April 1992) Just like the above-mentioned relegitimation expressed in the Conservative Manifesto, this is a very general statement on the state of




the British constitution, in this case a delegitimation on several counts and by comparison to a negatively connoted type of country. Yet it seems to be more difficult to counter delegitimating statements when it comes to measurable performance – an issue already discussed in the context of embedding and blame-shifting. Such performance aspects enter the picture with policy debates in fields of national concern, such as the British NHS, whose performance may be measured – and whose criticism may be underpinned empirically – on the basis of indicators such as waiting times for surgery; criticism of this kind is, therefore, not easily dismissed: Three objectives should underlie the design of a health service: equity, efficiency and effectiveness. The NHS was designed in 1945 to meet the first two criteria. It has succeeded in providing a service that is equitable, in that it is free to everyone and it is efficient, in that it is cheap by international standards. But it is not effective. Effectiveness means delivering a service that consumers perceive as of high quality and meeting their needs. (Guardian, 2 June 2001) Not surprisingly, this strategy is especially suitable in the context of events that per definitionem involve other political entities, which is notably the case with any move toward European integration and internationalization. Again in Britain, every time European treaties are debated in the wake of a European summit, comparing as a strategy is readily employed to enhance the legitimacy of national institutions and regime principles. This kind of legitimacy-related communication is very much focused on evaluations of democratic quality: ‘There should be no shame about our commitment to our independence, to self-government and to the democracy that we have, with all its imperfections. Our democracy is a damned sight better in this House than it is anywhere else in Europe’ (the MP for Bethnal Green and Stepney, Mr Shore, as quoted in Guardian, 21 November 1991). Grounds for less favourable evaluations of British democracy are mentioned in passing (‘with all its imperfections’), but the main thrust clearly is the subsequent relegitimation by way of comparison, with British democracy assessed to function better than ‘anywhere else in Europe’. This pattern is extremely frequent: Announcing a referendum on the EU constitution yesterday, Tony Blair insisted that there was a ‘partnership’, ‘not a conspiracy’. Yet the draft still has the cosiness of a European salon at the expense





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Hence internationalization and supranational integration have a particular effect on discussions related to the legitimacy of the nation state – an effect that is strongest when such steps have not yet been taken but are merely proposed and debated. The democratic nation state is put into perspective vis-à-vis those international or supranational political entities. Its deficiencies and shortcomings in terms of democratic quality, then, appear to be only minor concerns, given the more serious deficiencies of the other bodies and entities – domestic institutions are even portrayed as the incarnations or defenders of core values said to be missing outside or beyond the national borders. Denigrating international or supranational regimes in order to enhance the legitimacy of domestic institutions clearly represents a zero-sum game: the extent to which one regime or institution is delegitimated corresponds to the legitimacy gains of another (see Conclusion). Thus internationalization and supranational integration, at least in their early stages, do not necessarily undermine the legitimacy of the democratic nation state, as is often expected. Instead, they may serve to reinvigorate the appreciation of domestic institutions. All in all, the strategy of comparing is applicable in contexts of both delegitimation and relegitimation, but, when used in the latter sense, it is well suited to lending legitimacy to domestic institutions and regime principles by means of unfavourable comparisons with other political entities.

Different routes, similar effects All four countries examined sustain fair levels of democratic legitimacy but do so in different ways. In addition to the interpretations of the preceding chapters, this chapter elaborated on discursive strategies as a key to understanding how legitimation is made to outweigh delegitimation in public discourses. All three strategies rely heavily on institutions and regime principles of the democratic nation state as legitimacy anchors, whose legitimacy might spill over to more critically evaluated institutions, or as objects of comparisons which are most likely to result in a relegitimation of the democratic nation state. A crucial question relates to the conditions under which the described strategies are likely to come into play at all. In principle,



of the transparency and legitimacy of national parliaments. British voters hold to a quaint conception of democracy under which they can vote out governments they dislike every four or five years. (Times, 21 April 2004)


the deployment of these strategies can either prevent a national political order from being affected by a legitimacy crisis or enable it to cope with crisis tendencies that have already become apparent. The former is the case with anchors and the strategy of blameshifting. Blame-shifting is doubtlessly a frequent response to surges in delegitimating communication; more importantly, however, it helps sustain an institution’s anchor role – which in turn prevents serious crises. Embedding and comparing, by contrast, seem to more directly counter delegitimation tendencies and defuse an already aggravated situation. Next, the question arises where these strategies are deployed. We used examples mostly from one country (or even a single issue) for describing each strategy. Yet, we hesitate to speak of national strategies. Each strategy can be found in each of our four countries. However, although there is no clear indication of nation-specific patterns or distributions, embedding appears to be more common in the United States, blameshifting seems to prevail in Switzerland, and comparing is prominent in Britain. In Germany, no particular strategy stands out, which is why we illustrated the strategies with textual evidence from the three other countries. Yet each strategy is to some extent discernible in German legitimation debates as well. Notwithstanding national differences in the prevalence of each strategy, different strategies are frequently combined in national debates and even in individual art icles. The following argument, for example, combines the strategies of comparing and blame-shifting in order to relegitimate direct democracy in Switzerland: Political gridlock is part and parcel of (semi-)direct democracy. In contrast with indirect democracy, every single reform step can be fought by way of referenda in direct-democratic systems. ... This is what textbooks tell us. However, a glance across our boundaries shows that the indirect democracies of Germany and France are also incapable of far-reaching reforms. Hence gridlock has perhaps less to do with (semi-)direct democracy than with democracy in general. It is not just direct-democratic procedures that lead to reform blockages. The power and influence of interest groups that manage to defend the status quo against changes are to blame as well. (Tagesanzeiger, 25 May 2004)14 The initial delegitimation of direct democracy is clearly expressed, followed almost in textbook fashion by a comparison with other countries



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that are said to fare no better – a first attempt at relegitimation. This, in turn, is followed by blame-sharing as the softer version of blameshifting, with the argument that ‘not only’ direct-democratic procedures but also interest groups are responsible for the failure to overcome the status quo. To the extent that strategies do differ from one country to another and come to dominate particular national legitimation debates, this might put individual countries in a different position with regard to their capacity for adapting the foundations of their legitimacy to processes of globalization. Above, we made this argument with regard to national legitimation styles, but it could be equally valid with regard to particular strategies featured more or less prominently in national legitimation discourses. In Switzerland, blame-shifting as a strategy tends to rely on a single anchor – direct democracy – and a few corresponding patterns. In this sense, the strategy is somewhat less flexible than others and at the same time rather domestic or inwardlooking. We suspect that, up to a certain level of globalization, the legitimacy of the Swiss political system can be sustained by way of this strategy. Against the backdrop of accelerated internationalization – for instance, if the country were to join the EU – this highly specific basis of its legitimacy in Switzerland would be in great danger of erosion, and a legitimacy crisis might ensue. The dominant strategy in the United States, embedding, seems rather neutral in the face of globalization processes. Finally, in Great Britain, where comparing is the most prominent strategy, the legitimation discourse can draw on a broad variety of evaluative statements, since virtually every object or pattern is comparable, some with international organizations, all with other national systems. Compared with the strategy predominantly used in Switzerland, this strategy proves highly flexible and is strictly outward-looking. While its heavy reliance on the pattern of accountability would seem to make the legitimacy of the British system particularly vulnerable to globalization, the frequent use of the strategy of comparing might partially offset this effect, since the national political system can always be portrayed as superior to the ‘outside world’. The point of departure of our study was the question of whether the legitimacy of the democratic nation state is in jeopardy. This chapter has, however, shown that, by deploying various strategies of relegitimation, discourse participants may successfully tackle challenges to the legitimacy of political systems. We hold that, in addition to the explanations of stability offered so far, these strategies also matter because





they can prevent a national political system from being affected by a legitimacy crisis or enable it to cope with emerging crisis tendencies. In other words, they also contribute to ensuring the stability of a regime’s legitimacy. Such stability, we maintain, is not the result of simple inertia in public discourses but clearly a communicative achievement, and hence only detectable in analyses that take into account the communicative dimension of legitimation.



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Conclusion: Broadening the Agenda of Legitimacy Research

Our study questions the frequently hypothesized erosion of the democratic nation state’s legitimacy in the age of globalization. In public spheres and media discourses, whose important role in the generation and maintenance of regime support motivated us to develop the novel text analytical perspective of this book, the legitimacy of Western democracies appears remarkably stable. There is little, if any, evidence for a general or full-fledged erosion of legitimacy in the quality press of the four countries examined – Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the United States – over the last fifteen years. Our empirical inferences in Chapters 3 to 5 – according to which the democratic nation state, in a nutshell, remains considerably more legitimate than extant crisis diagnoses suggest – were based on a number of conceptual and methodological innovations which might also be used in the context of other key discursive arenas, such as the academic sphere, parliamentary debates, and so on. In order to examine legitimacy-related debates, we first had to define and operationalize the basic elements and features of legitimation discourses – the kinds of evaluative propositions that we call legitimation statements. The ‘grammar’ of these statements provided us with an analytical framework for the examination of the structures and trajectories of this type of political communication. It also enabled us to differentiate and qualify our key finding in a number of ways. First of all, the value of our hierarchy of legitimation objects was corroborated by our empirical analysis. In each of the four countries, some objects are delegitimated to a greater extent than others. However, political communities and systems as a whole – as well as their respective core institutions – tend to enjoy much higher levels of legitimacy than marginal institutions. For a second important differentiation, we 183 10.1057/9780230275331 - Democracy's Deep Roots, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner


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were able to draw on our typology of crisis scenarios and to verify that there is not much evidence for a general shift towards non-democratic legitimation patterns – that is, a collapse or transformation of democratic legitimacy – either. Of course, the range of empirically relevant normative criteria for the evaluation of political systems and institutions is considerable, and it includes both democratic and non- democratic – as well as input-oriented and output-based – patterns. However, democratic criteria have by no means become obsolete, and hence we are not observing a creeping ‘de-democratization’ of legitimation discourses or their normative foundations. The legitimacy of political systems is thus continuously reproduced in nationally specific variants. These legitimation styles reflect nationally specific regime principles, institutional arrangements, and political cultures such as the much-revered constitutions of Germany and the United States, or direct democracy in Switzerland, as well as related values and evaluation standards. The prominence of such anchor institutions and legitimation resources in public discourses tends to stabilize the legitimacy of regimes as a whole. Moreover, the scope and nature of legitimacy-related communication in each of the examined countries turn out to be strongly influenced by triggering events and rituals such as electoral campaigns, government formations, or policy debates. Hence there is an ebb and flow of public attention to the features – and to the legitimacy – of national political systems and their core institutions. Mechanisms that would allow situational criticism to turn into sustained challenges to core regime elements, thus possibly jeopardizing the overall stability of discursive support, do not seem to exist. Instead, we find that criticism usually remains at – or is diverted to – the level of specific policies or authorities; these, rather than the regime as a whole, tend to be held responsible for any perceived problems. Yet where a problem is framed as being caused by the incumbent government, there are convenient solutions: the dismissal of individual members of governments, or – if all else fails – ‘throwing the rascals out’. Likewise, the termination or reform of an individual policy or institution may suffice to re-establish discursive support in the wake of such crises. In short, challenges of this more narrowly circumscribed kind are unlikely to become genuine legitimacy crises, and the legitimacy of a regime may even be strengthened where governments are held accountable and perceived problems are tackled successfully in the described fashion. To sum up, then, discursive support for established democracies appears to be surprisingly robust. Entire political communities or systems with their core institutions and principles tend to be rather ‘immune’



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to delegitimation, and criticism is more often than not directed at individual policies and authorities, or at specific (often relatively marginal) institutions. Potentially dangerous criticism may usually be defused by way of reference to legitimation anchors and resources that are held in particular esteem. And, where such ‘internal’ relegitimation strategies do not prove effective, there is still the option to use comparative strategies – references to countries and political orders that allegedly do not live up to the high democratic standards of one’s own system. The dynamics of legitimacy attention cycles and the availability of relegitimation strategies thus represent another set of stabilizing factors for the legitimacy of the democratic nation state.

Evidence to the contrary? One may well ask, though, whether these conclusions are tenable. After all, public opinion research has yielded a lot of evidence suggesting a decline of citizen trust – and notably dwindling support for parties and the political class – in Western democracies (for many, see Dalton 2004). However, such findings are ambiguous. Moreover, a key difference between research into political attitudes and research into the communicative dimension of legitimacy has to be considered. As suggested in Chapter 2, media discourses in general and the quality press in particular undoubtedly have an elite bias – the journalists working for these media have themselves to be considered as members of a broadly conceived political elite. The representations and assessments of political reality in the quality press greatly influence the perceptions of other elite groups and actors; professional observers of political developments tend to rely on the quality press for interpretations and evaluations when they draw up their own positions. May the gap between our findings and the crisis diagnoses prevalent in survey-based research, then, have something to do with the elite bias of the quality press? The discrepancy between the alleged erosion of political support – as measured by public opinion research – and the stable levels and foundations of legitimacy observed by our own empirical study could, in fact, provoke two very different interpretations. A pessimistic interpretation would suggest that the media simply ignore a genuine erosion of support and that media discourses are increasingly ‘out of touch’ with political attitudes in the citizenry – or, conversely, that the people do not take their cues from the still rather upbeat media in their own assessments of democratic government. In short, this interpretation is based on the notion of a growing disconnect between media discourses and



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journalistic or political elites on the one hand, and public opinion at the grass roots level on the other. How relevant is this disconnect in a political sense? If, as we argued in Chapter 2, many negative attitudes are likely to be artificially provoked by the stimulus–response logic of public opinion research, and if few of them are expressed in public or translated into acts of dissent, one might answer this question in a rather sanguine fashion. However, other available indicators – such as growing electoral abstention rates – appear to suggest that critical legitimacy beliefs are indeed more and more frequently translated into genuine delegitimating behaviour. If so, the citizens and elites of Western democracies truly live in ‘separate worlds’: an increasingly disaffected citizen world that is less and less supportive of democratic government and its normative foundations on the one hand, and on the other an elite world – including the quality press – that remains loyal to democratic government and its principles but proves unable or unwilling to take the growing alienation of citizens seriously. The more optimistic interpretation leads us back to the ‘critical citizens’ argument, according to which the observed dissatisfaction is the outcome of growing expectations and political efficacy combined with a kind of diffuse uneasiness. Neither this ‘benevolent’ type of criticism nor such an essentially apathetic and therefore innocuous uneasiness – which the survey method is most likely to inflate – represents a genuine delegitimation of democratic regimes in this view. The press appears as the major repository both of very discerning, hard-to-satisfy normative criteria – especially standards of democratic quality – and of affirmative rather than critical evaluations, thus systematically marginalizing expressions of criticism and downplaying citizen apathy. The indicators used by public opinion researchers would, then, seem to confound two very different forms of criticism and disaffection, and provide an overly bleak interpretation of an essentially stable situation. While the sudden onset of a legitimacy crisis seems quite compatible with the first, pessimistic scenario, it appears less likely against the backdrop of the second interpretation. But we cannot clarify the greater or lesser appropriateness of these two interpretations here. A further pursuit of this question is beyond the purview of this book, and, in any case, there is no conclusive knowledge about the exact relationship between the quality press and public opinion formation. To what extent do legitimacy-related claims conveyed by the media influence the legitimacy beliefs and evaluations of citizens, and do citizens ground their actual behaviour in such assessments? Extant media impact analyses



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remain inconclusive and do not allow broad generalizations regarding the relationship between public spheres – as reflected by the media – and citizen attitudes. Yet, given the presumptive role of the media in the (re)production of public spheres and the construction of social reality, it would appear far-fetched to hypothesize that there is no link whatsoever between the contents and dynamics of legitimacy-related media discourses on the one hand, and the development of attitudes on the other. The same holds for the relationship between the communicative and the behavioural dimension of legitimacy. Future empirical legitimacy research must, therefore, explore the relationships between the three dimensions of legitimacy and the exact nature of the transformational mechanisms that might be at work. For the time being, however, caution is required in the combined interpretation of findings gleaned from different dimensions of legitimacy, as no reliable knowledge exists about the nature of their interaction, and hence no clear understanding as to which kinds of generalizations are permissible. Yet it seems clear enough what the ultimate goal has to be – namely, an encompassing, integrative approach that does justice to the multidimensional character of legitimacy and legitimation understood as empirical phenomena. In a recent lecture on political communication research, Jürgen Habermas hinted at the rationale for – and contours of – such an integrative approach, bringing the attitudinal dimension together with media content in the following definition of public opinion: Public opinion is hard to capture empirically. Ultimately, it arises out of an intuitive bridging of perceived differences between published opinions – which are strongly influenced by the quality press – on the one hand, and the distribution of opinions revealed by representative surveys on the other. In short, public opinion is the virtually unquantifiable result of efforts undertaken by opinion-leading elites and the more or less conscious reactions of a broad and diverse mass public. (Habermas 2008: 170–1; our translation) But the integration of different dimensions of – and methodological approaches to – legitimacy is not the only frontier of empirical legitimacy research in the age of globalization. The ongoing internationalization and privatization of political authority – which is widely held responsible for the erosion or transformation of legitimacy and its democratic foundations in the extant literature – also raises questions about the legitimacy of the emerging internationalized and (public–)



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Legitimacy and global governance Many observers agree that the heyday of the democratic nation state is over, and much political authority has been transferred to internationalized governance arrangements. In today’s world, therefore, legitimacy might no longer be an attribute that accrues only to national political systems and their core institutions. In other words, the internationalization of political responsibilities should foster a concomitant internationalization of legitimation discourses. The newly emerging and increasingly powerful arrangements beyond the nation state to which the term global governance refers – continent-wide organizations, such as the EU, and international regimes with a broader geographical reach, such as the United Nations, the WTO, and the G8 summit regime – are thus likely to become legitimation objects in their own right; all these political entities can be assessed in light of normative criteria, and hence treated as objects that need or deserve to be called legitimate. Again, we may speak of a legitimation statement if the evaluation is not in the light of particular interests but of generalizable standards and values, and when the evaluation is pitched at the regime level – for instance, the UN regime rather than the Secretary General of the day or a specific UN mission. However, we may also safely expect the institutional peculiarities of international or supranational organizations – which owe their existence to treaties among nation states – to affect the nature of communication related to their legitimacy. At the national level, the distinction between policies, authorities, and the regime is straightforward. Governments – as well as the opportunity to ‘throw the rascals out’ at periodic elections – are easily identified and understood, and the distinction between authorities and regime is founded on this basic understanding. The visibility of leaders is much less pronounced in international organizations, and there is no real equivalent to national governments. Secretaries General and the chairpersons of summit regimes or international conferences are often the only clearly discernible personalities, but they do not have the competencies of a head of state or government. Hence there are few analogies between international organizations and national political systems, with the arguable exception of the EU (Steffek 2007: 181).



private governance arrangements themselves. Do we have to take new categories of legitimation objects – besides national political systems and institutions – into account? If so, which adaptations to our framework would this entail, and how might an integrated perspective on the legitimacy of national and international regimes look?

These similarities between the EU and national systems are in fact moved to centre stage by a strand of research that draws on the analytical instruments of comparative politics rather than IR research to analyse the EU (Hix 2005). But this analytical perspective actually underscores the fact that there is no real equivalent to a head of government in Brussels. For a variety of reasons, the president of the Commission cannot be qualified as the EU’s head of government. Given that decisionmaking power ultimately resides with the member states (if not always in the form of consensual decisions), the EU and other international regimes are ‘governed’ by a large number of states and their respective governments. Therefore, perceptions of authorities exclusively linked to these organizations are unlikely to arise. In short, the level of authorities is weakly established in internationalized governance arrangements. Even more strongly than for the EU and the other above-mentioned international regimes, this holds for the considerable number of regimes that do not have their own formal organization but essentially represent systems of norms. The lack of a permanent organization and staff, for instance, is characteristic of an intergovernmental arrangement such as the G8 summits. If anything, the so-called sherpas – even though they are representatives of national governments, supporting heads of state or government in G8-related questions and coordinating activities between summits – might be qualified as political staff of the G8. But their low public visibility alone ensures that they are unlikely to be perceived, let alone plausibly qualified, as authorities. Otherwise, only the heads of state or government of each summit year’s host country may be viewed as temporary G8 authorities. The G8 is a good example of the fact that the lack of visible personnel may even intensify legitimacy-related communication. Where there are no replaceable staff, only individual policies or the regime as a whole may be attacked by critics – and the latter happens a lot. Whereas national political systems have two ways of tackling challenges to their regime and its core institutions, namely, diversion to policies or authorities, international or supranational organizations can draw on only one mechanism – the (re)framing of criticism as a mere policy issue.1 There is yet another strategy for mitigating (negative) evaluations and diverting them from the regime as a whole that internationalized governance arrangements tend to lack. At the national level, the regime as a legitimation object may be differentiated into several tiers: actor groups, individual institutions, and the political system or community as a whole with its regime principles (see Chapter 3). The internal structures of international organizations are frequently not differentiated in this



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way, or their structures are not nearly as well known and understood, and so the ascription of support or criticism to individual institutions or actors associated with international political entities is difficult. As with the lack of authorities, the underdeveloped internal differentiation of these entities is likely to translate into direct attacks on the regime as a whole. Only a few global and internationalized governance arrangements are internally differentiated and institutionalized enough to allow the identification of specific regime principles. Of course, the nonviolence norm is a key principle of the UN. In the case of the World Bank or the IMF, however, the exact identification of such principles is already much less straightforward. This is also due to the fact that only those basic principles that transcend individual policy fields may be qualified as elements of the regime. Yet many international organizations are precisely focused on a specific field and functionally specialized, so that they develop policy rather than genuine regime principles. Moreover, while the political communities associated with these cases have a potentially broad – global, continental, or (macro)regional – scope, international organizations – unlike nation states – do not regulate all the issues that affect these spaces and the people living in them. Evaluations of global or regional communities, therefore, are not directly linked with specific international organizations. Together, all these considerations suggest that the regime itself will receive much more attention and be the object of more legitimacy-related communication than is the case at the national level. Only the close link between policy responsibilities and the regime in functionally specialized organizations raises the plausibility of framing conflicts and negative evaluations as merely policy-related. International organizations – merely by virtue of the fact that they are not directly responsible for the administration of policies but always rely on the mediation of nation states and their executives – do not have a daily presence in public spheres. Instead, references to them – and assessments of their legitimacy even more so – are contingent upon specific events such as summit meetings, conferences and plenary sessions, or crisis situations that necessitate the intervention of an inter national organization. Hence we may hypothesize that cyclical effects are even stronger and these situational contexts have greater importance than at the national level. This also means that short phases of heightened legitimation intensity, in which doubts about the legitimacy of these governance arrangements come to the fore, will alternate with extended



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phases of very low attention levels, and perhaps even a total lack of legitimacy-related communication. As for legitimation patterns, we may expect characteristic differences between the national and international levels as well. At the international level, the democracy problem is particularly acute. One of the key problems of international organizations is their legal foundation, usually established by way of treaties between nation states. From a strict normative and democratic theory perspective, this legal basis cannot ensure democratic legitimacy, in a twofold sense. First, a number of member states of these arrangements cannot be qualified as democracies themselves; second, there is no political equality among the citizens of the member states, and majorities of affected citizens play no – or, as in the case of the EU, a very limited – role in decision-making. Against the backdrop of institutions and procedures at the national level, democratic theorists, therefore, frequently criticize international organizations for their presumptive lack of input legitimacy. In political science debates, this kind of criticism has fostered a plethora of contributions. Many of them attempt to normatively construct alternative forms of legitimacy, which are sometimes even qualified as ‘democratic’, especially legitimacy grounded in deliberation or the reasoned use of knowledge and expertise. Other contributions shift their attention to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which claim to represent whole populations, or specific parts of them and their interests, and lobby international organizations on their behalf. This approach suggests a plausible equivalent on the input side for the kind of citizen and interest-group participation that we see at the national level. However, one must not overlook the fact that the national electoral mechanism does not have an equivalent at the international level, whether in international regimes or in NGOs. A third group of contributions is more ‘conservative’ in the sense that it highlights the intergovernmental foundations of international organizations – suggesting that their input legitimacy is adequately secured by national chains of legitimation. However, this kind of legitimacy may only be qualified as democratic if the elements of this chain are indeed democratically constituted. Yet, given the high number of non-democratic member states of international organizations, this can hardly be said to be the case. Thus, according to the normative strand of the literature, input legitimacy – a term that refers to or implies popular sovereignty, elections, responsiveness, and political equality – is a fundamental problem for internationalized governance arrangements.



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So what empirical hypotheses can be formulated about publicly communicated legitimacy assessments of internationalized governance arrangements? One might, first of all, hypothesize that the criterion of successful human rights protection – already important in discourses on national legitimation objects – should be given even more prominence. Support for international organizations arguably has to be grounded in support for their activities and output – and the human rights criterion appears most promising in that regard. Where international organizations are not effective in protecting human rights, the criterion might be used as a major, readily available evaluation standard for their critics as well. Other important legitimation patterns should be a function of the respective organization’s responsibilities. Where internationalized governance arrangements have a spectrum of responsibilities broadly comparable to that of nation states, and hence especially in EU-related legitimation discourses, we may expect the sets of patterns to be most similar to those prevailing at the national level. In the previous chapters, we have been able to identify different styles for legitimating each respective national political system. In a similar vein, we may now ask whether there are national styles of (de)legitimating internationalized arrangements, and whether the same object types and patterns are used that are privileged at the national level. Is there a similarity or convergence of legitimation styles with regard to national and international legitimation objects? Are the type and extent of legitimation or delegitimation a function of institutional similarities between national and international or supranational political systems (a question that matters most with a view to the EU)? It remains difficult to formulate pertinent hypotheses. Yet one might expect the stabilizing function of national legitimation styles and anchors to be much less pronounced at the international level, precisely because there is unlikely to be an exact fit between national and international political systems. This, too, should make international organizations more vulnerable than national political systems. But perhaps they can also draw on relegitimation strategies? In our analysis of national legitimation discourses, we were able to identify three major strategies for the relegitimation of regimes that are faced with legitimacy challenges. The first strategy, embedding, cushions attacks on specific legitimation objects by countering them with positive evaluations of institutions or principles higher up in our object hierarchy that are deemed to be more important for the overall legitimacy of a regime. However, this strategy is only viable where an established hierarchy of legitimation



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objects and anchors exists in the public mind. Given their lack of internal differentiation, or insufficient public awareness of it, evaluations of international organizations are unlikely to be able to draw on such anchors. Thus criticism is likely to affect the entire regime. The second strategy, blame-shifting (that is, the deflection of criticism to institutions considered marginal for the regime and its overall legitimacy), is also premised on the existence of such legitimacy anchors. But are there strategies of comparison that international organizations might be able to capitalize on? It is conceivable that several political entities could be assessed in a positive fashion without having to compete for discursive support.2 The UN, the EU, and the Federal Republic of Germany could all be considered legitimate by one and the same public. However, the ascription of legitimacy to each of these entities might no longer occur in a mutually isolated fashion. The more political entities that are in need of legitimacy, the more important comparisons between them become. The nation state and its institutions, as well as international organizations, are, therefore, likely to be evaluated together more and more often. Chapter 5 illustrated that such comparisons also play a key role in the evaluation of national political systems and their institutions. Our findings suggest that the individual elements of these systems are, for instance, frequently compared in terms of their effectiveness or their contribution to democratic quality, that their relative importance is weighed, and that the interaction of several institutions is evaluated positively or negatively in such complex argumentations. We encountered them not least in contexts in which national political systems were debated and evaluated against the backdrop of international or supranational regimes and organizations. The comparison of different objects’ legitimacy may take several forms. The elements of legitimation statements – different institutions and regimes at the national and international level, or different legitimation patterns – may, first, be pitted against each other in the form of a zero-sum relationship. Second, they may be combined in a ‘synergetic’, mutually reinforcing fashion that strengthens the legitimacy of the assessed objects and their interaction (a positive-sum relationship). Finally, the coupling of different legitimation objects may also undermine the legitimacy of each (a negative-sum relationship). For instance, a zero-sum relationship obtains where challenges to the legitimacy of national regimes or institutions are fended off by way of comparative references to the legitimacy deficits of international regimes. But we might also encounter the opposite case of ‘multilevel legitimation’,



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Democracy’s Deep Roots Table 6.1 Types of relational legitimation statements (multilevel legitimation)

Nation state evaluated as … legitimate illegitimate

legitimate

illegitimate

positive-sum relationship zero-sum relationship

zero-sum relationship negative-sum relationship

where the legitimacy of national institutions is attacked and weakened on the basis of such comparisons (Table 6.1). In a similar vein, positive-sum relationships may become important. Such relationships obtain where pronounced discursive support for one political entity is used as a resource for the legitimation of another – for instance, by suggesting that the legitimacy of one object spills over from or contributes to another institution’s legitimacy. To complete the typology, we have to take negative-sum relationships into account; these may be diagnosed where perceived deficits of one entity are also used to delegitimate another. The hypothesis that globalization fosters an erosion of support for political authority frequently implies the notion of such a negative-sum relationship between regime levels: as political responsibilities are shifted from the nation state to international or supranational arrangements, the legitimacy of both levels suffers. Whereas the national tier loses autonomy and state capacity to international or supranational organizations, and its democratic quality appears to be jeopardized by globalization processes, the latter are much less able to justify their increased power with reference to democratic evaluation standards. Instead of this scenario, on which our study casts serious doubt, there is a more plausible alternative, especially with a view to the development of the EU, namely, a trend towards postnational forms of legitimation. We may speak of postnational legitimation where legitimation statements associate the national with the supranational level, and both are evaluated as legitimate. We call this positive-sum game ‘postnational’ because the upward shift of responsibilities does not affect the national political system negatively, but rather contributes to the stabilization of its legitimacy.



International regime evaluated as …

Conclusion 195

The legitimacy requirement may no longer be restricted to political regimes and institutions in a narrow sense, however, be it at the national or international level. As the power and influence of national and transnational private actors has expanded, confronting them with expectations and assessing them against the backdrop of evaluation standards that have so far been reserved for political entities could gain in importance – in short, economic units might be turning into legitimation objects. An increase in public expressions of support for – or criticism of – economic units in the light of generalizable normative criteria – legitimation patterns – would affect the private character of the economic sphere; (quasi-)private justifications or delegitimations of economic actors and their operations, and of market structures writ large, would no longer suffice and would increasingly be replaced by claims and assessments rooted in the evaluation standards of broader public discourses. If so, empirical legitimacy research must put the justification and criticism of economic units on its agenda. However, market economies have a very different character from political regimes and institutions, and hence it is not obvious what exactly the legitimation objects in this context might be. Again, we can try to apply our distinction between evaluations related to policies and authorities on the one hand, and genuine legitimacy-related communication about economic regimes on the other. Still, it is not immediately clear who the authorities of economic systems are, and which of their features constitute elements of the regime. Here we may build on the theoretical insight of the institutional economics literature (Williamson 1975, 1985; Coase 1988) that firms and markets represent the basic units of capitalist market economies, and therefore posit that legitimacyrelated communication about economic systems would amount to the (de)legitimation of these two basic units in the light of normative criteria. Firms and markets might thus be addressed as legitimation objects, although it is unlikely that all corporations will be deemed important enough for legitimacy assessments. One could, therefore, hypothesize that businesses are most likely to be (de)legitimated if their corporate strategies or products directly or indirectly affect a very large number of persons (as customers, employees, and citizens). This should primarily be the case for large corporations, not least for multinational corporations or ‘global players’. One might thus expect the relatively small group of corporations that manage to dominate national or even global markets to be increasingly faced with expectations about – and



Legitimacy and market economies


assessments of – their legitimacy, and consequently one should be able to identify more and more often the kinds of legitimation statements in public discourses about them that we described and identified with regard to political objects. Easton’s distinction between policies, authorities, and regime may, then, be applied to corporations in an analogous fashion. The forms of production and the product, marketing, and lobbying strategies of large firms can be qualified as policies, and criticism of, say, the safety technology used in a specific type of car by a major firm would constitute an evaluation that remains at the policy level. The managers and board members – as well as stockholders – of corporations may be understood as authorities by analogy with the political sphere. Where the CEO of a firm is attacked because of his or her corporate strategy, we are thus faced with an evaluation of authorities. Finally, we may speak of assessments at the regime level where a firm is assessed as a whole – for instance, Enron or Siemens are accused of corruption, Microsoft is charged with erecting a monopoly, or Nestlé with allegedly ‘killing babies’. Such criticism is focused on the very existence or constitution of a corporation, and it therefore appears plausible to use the terms ‘regime’ and ‘legitimation’ in that context. As regimes, businesses are often – and still by analogy with political systems – internally differentiated in a way that enables observers to discern several core institutions (depending on the type of corporate governance), as well as a cor porate community and principles in which the operations of the firm are grounded.3 While this transfer of our analytical vocabulary from political legitimacy research to the economic sphere appears relatively unproblematic, it is questionable whether this will succeed with regard to the second basic unit of economic systems, that is, markets. After all, markets as such are not organizations, and hence – unlike political regimes or institutions, and also unlike firms – they cannot have internal organizational differentiations and units, or employ personnel. Yet, as recent work in economic sociology has convincingly shown (Swedberg 2003; Beckert and Zafirovski 2006), markets are, nevertheless, institutionalized social structures. They are more than the sum of exchange relationships or processes of competitive price formation. Nevertheless, even if we concede the institutionalized character of markets, the question remains whether there are boundary lines that enable us to plausibly distinguish between evaluations of the regime and those merely related to authorities or the policy level. Individual market transactions and market developments (often closely linked with the activities of specific corporations) may be qualified as policies. On the other hand, for the



196

reasons given above, there are no market authorities in Easton’s sense of the word. Where the managerial class or financial investors are criticized as a group, we may already speak of criticism at the regime level – by analogy with the political class or elites. Moreover, core market institutions – such as the freedom to contract with others, free trade, corporate autonomy, and independent central banks – and the overall structures or development of markets can be viewed as elements of the regime. Thus one may also speak of a hierarchy of legitimation objects in the economic sphere, along the lines developed in Chapter 3 for political regimes and institutions. The most general challenge to be made would, then, be an attack on market economies and capitalism as a whole. The constitution of markets is certainly not independent of political decisions. Yet it may be the case that economic units or the (multilevel) interaction between political decisions and a specific market constitution is made the subject of – critical or supportive – legitimation statements, instead of the national, European or international political entities involved as such. Given the high degree of internationalization of the economic sphere, a legitimacy crisis of national corporate champions remains a possibility, while the (de)legitimation of markets should now usually be directed at international phenomena. The economic units that are the objects of legitimacy-related communication exist independently of political entities, and they do not necessarily have the same scope. Turning to legitimation patterns, a transfer of our analytical framework to the economic sphere also appears plausible. Impressionistic evidence suggests that businesses and markets today are often held accountable in an almost ‘political’ sense. For instance, their accountability and responsiveness to customer and citizen preferences, their transparency, and their credibility may be debated. Of course, efficiency and effectiveness should continue to represent particularly important benchmarks for economic units, but criteria such as justice, the contribution of ‘global players’ to international stability and security, and the more or less democratic governance of businesses might become increasingly prominent as evaluation standards. Not only standards gleaned from the political sphere could be used, however. If we further develop the analogy between market economies and the political sphere, consumer sovereignty might become the equivalent of popular sovereignty, and, in line with mainstream economic theory, one would, of course, point to (allocative) efficiency – made possible by the sovereignty of consumers and other economic actors – as the principal benchmark.



Conclusion 197


Stable legitimacy grounded in these two economic criteria may, then, be viewed as a functional equivalent to democratic legitimacy in the political sphere – in the sense that the most fundamental attack on capitalism and its core principles or institutions would involve delegitimations using the evaluation standards of consumer sovereignty and efficiency, whereas our normatively most dramatic crisis scenario in the political context – the erosion of legitimacy – involved the combination of negative evaluations and democratic legitimation patterns. Hence one might ask whether discursive support for firms and markets is stable or eroding, and whether or not (de)legitimations remain grounded in the kinds of criteria that one would expect to be dominant in their assessment. This, in turn, suggests a threefold crisis typology analogous to the one used in our own empirical study on political regimes and institutions. The first crisis would be an erosion of legitimacy grounded in the efficiency criterion (efficiency crisis). As suggested above, a collapse of legitimacy would be the diagnosis when market economies are delegitimated, the efficiency criterion loses its importance, and other evaluation standards – such as failure in terms of environmental sustainability and distributive justice, or the weak democratic quality of corporate governance – underpin negative assessments of capitalism and its institutions. But the legitimacy foundations of market economies could also be transformed; in this case, assessments would continue to be mostly positive but no longer predominantly grounded in the standards of consumer sovereignty and efficiency. Whether such a transformation would constitute a threat to the principles and functioning of market economies might, then, depend on the kinds of alternative criteria that presented themselves. Finally, might there once again be discursive strategies for the (de) legitimation of economic regimes and institutions? The joint use and hierarchization of legitimation objects or patterns is the defining feature of embedding and blame-shifting as relegitimation strategies, as defined above and in Chapter 5. A quick glance at developments in Germany, for instance, shows that, even in countries where political communication has hitherto taken a largely neoliberal turn, more recent criticism of the managerial class and its outlandish greed – as indicated by the ever-growing earnings of CEOs – may lead to a conspicuous shift in the public mood and a significant erosion of support. The importance of relegitimation strategies for economic actors and institutions should, therefore, be on the rise. Another glance at media discourses suggests that two kinds of relegitimating claims tend to be made in response to such challenges.



198

First is the claim that exaggerated remuneration is an entirely marginal, if annoying, phenomenon. Second, we find the argument that, while deplorable, it supports the competitive nature of market economies and is thus functional. This raises the interesting empirical question as to how well such relegitimation strategies stand their ground against escalation strategies in which assessments of ‘the managers’ and their behaviour is turned into the condemnation of whole markets, or even of the principles and institutions of capitalism writ large. However, the third strategy, of comparing, should be most pertinent in the economic sphere. Comparison is part and parcel of competitive processes, and hence one may expect that relational strategies of the kind described above are particularly frequent in public debates on economic questions. Such comparisons may have a relegitimating effect if speakers are able to highlight countries, businesses, and markets, or specific market elements and constitutions, that appear even less justifiable against the backdrop of this or that set of evaluation standards than the ones that are being attacked. Coming up with such comparisons appears an easy task, and hence this form of legitimation should be widespread.

The interplay of economic and political legitimation What overall picture, then, is suggested by these admittedly speculative thoughts? What does it mean if nation states, the EU, international organizations, major corporations, and market economies all have to legitimate themselves, and hence are, by the same token, faced with the possibility of losing the kind of support that we call legitimacy? As suggested in our analysis of the relationship between national and international political entities, more or less harmonious relationships (positive, zero and negative-sum games) may emerge. Two scenarios appear particularly relevant from a political science perspective. In the first scenario, the democratic nation state is the problem-solver of last resort, as it were, whenever legitimacy deficits in other political entities or in the economic sphere are discovered by the public. The nation state, in this scenario, is the ultimate bearer of legitimacy – a bastion that may still be deemed legitimate when all other regimes are already under massive pressure or faced with a genuine legitimacy crisis. Thus, whenever legitimacy deficits at the international level or in the economic sphere become apparent, the nation state will – and can – be expected to step in. As a regime whose own legitimacy is fairly stable, it should usually be successful in tackling such challenges. And, whenever the nation state proves itself as a problem-solver of last resort,



Conclusion 199

trust in it as the only truly democratic and effective regime should grow even further. One might call this the ‘nation state as shock-absorber’ scenario.4 The ‘cumulative scenario’, by contrast, entails the hypothesis that legitimacy crises of international political regimes or the economic sphere will also drag the democratic nation state into a vicious circle of declining support, and hence foster a mutually reinforcing legitimacy crisis. This process may be imagined as follows. The democratic deficit at the international and European levels is accompanied by growing scepticism about democracy in national public spheres. In the media, the legitimacy of the democratic nation state might remain stable, but citizens withdraw their support from parties, elections, or other core political institutions and rituals. Losses of democratic quality fostered by internationalization and growing public scepticism towards democratic government are, moreover, combined with a politicization of the economic sphere. While the economic system has hitherto served as a largely unquestioned pillar or background condition of democratic governance, the principles and institutions of market economies now face the same expectations as political systems. There is a rising demand for transparency and accountability, the managerial class is as much the object of criticism as the political class, and the increasingly frequent corporate scandals impact on the acceptance of market institutions such as, for instance, financial-sector regulations. These scandals also nurture the fear that Western economies could once again be faced with major crises like the Great Depression of 1929. Citizens’ expectations of economic actors and institutions grow, while opportunities to act and the chance to meet expectations become more narrowly circumscribed in a globalized world. One might, then, expect nation states, major corporations, markets, and the institutions of global governance to be drawn together into a major legitimacy crisis as soon as the economic success of these regimes and institutions goes into decline. The outcome of this crisis – should it indeed occur – seems totally unclear, not least because there are no explicit or normatively plausible alternatives to the current political and economic systems of the Western world. While the empirical findings presented here indicate that the legitimacy of the democratic nation state is relatively stable, they do not necessarily corroborate the shock-absorber scenario, whose confirmation would force us to consider the national and international levels together, as well as the economic sphere. This was beyond the purview of our empirical study. Yet, the issue of empirical confirmation notwithstanding, are there convincing arguments that point us in the direction




of the shock-absorber or the cumulative scenario? The former, plausible as it may be, assumes that the trust enjoyed by the nation state as the ultimate problem-solver and bearer of legitimacy is backed by genuine state capacity. However, if this capacity dwindles as a result of internationalization and privatization trends, the ascription of legitimacy may overwhelm the nation state. The shock-absorber hypothesis may, then, be confirmed for the time being, but, the moment the state fails to assume its ultimate responsibility, trust in it might dwindle all the more rapidly. This trust is, in other words, not immune to challenges and not independent of outputs. If this line of reasoning is correct, and democratic and input-based legitimacy are only secure during ‘goodweather periods’, then we should expect a qualitative change of legitimation processes and discourses, and the cumulative hypothesis might ultimately be confirmed. Thus crisis diagnoses may still turn out to be more appropriate than their more sanguine counterparts. However, it is our hope that this book has contributed to the identification of the kinds of mechanisms and strategies that counteract such tendencies. In short, legitimacy crises remain possible, but Western democracies appear quite resistant to them for the time being.

Summary Future empirical legitimacy research will have to develop a more encompassing agenda, in a double sense. First, international political entities, businesses, and markets have to be included as (potential) legitimation objects. One obvious consequence of the generalization of the legitimacy concept sketched above – and of legitimacy-related expectations and assessments in the ‘real world’ of public communication – is that research must now consider a whole range of objects as reference points of legitimation processes – even those that are not prima facie political in character. Whatever is viewed as legitimate or illegitimate by the public must be taken seriously by legitimacy researchers as soon as evaluations are pitched at the regime or system level. A single-minded focus on the nation state with its institutions and on the political sphere alone no longer suffices, because legitimacy appears to be more and more frequently attributed to international and economic regimes, not least in media communication. But such a focus on the nation state and its institutions is also inappropriate because the (de)legitimation of the nation state is more and more often linked with the assessment of these newly emerging legitimation objects. Ascriptions of legitimacy at the different levels, or in the political and economic spheres, are no longer



Conclusion 201

isolated acts. Given the growing frequency of comparative or relational legitimation statements, any single object’s legitimacy levels increasingly depend on the legitimacy status of other political and economic regimes and institutions. These relationships may, however, be examined within the unified analytical framework – with the key concepts of legitimation objects, patterns, and strategies – developed in this book. Second, research on public opinion and political behaviour has to be integrated with a communicative perspective. These strands of research are supplementary rather than competing. Clearly, the notion that survey results are the ‘ultimate’ evidence of legitimacy and regime support has to be relinquished. The survey method does not capture the ‘essence’ of empirical legitimacy and its foundations any better than the other strands – it simply measures a different aspect or dimension of legitimacy from research on behaviour or discourses. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for the other approaches. Legitimacy is a multidimensional phenomenon, and hence it would be inappropriate to grant a predominant status to any one of these approaches or to the respective indicators of (il)legitimacy that each of them privileges. The communication-centred legitimacy research advocated in this book is not a mere supplementary dimension of public opinion research, but a genuine field of research that aspires to capture a key dimension of legitimation processes, namely, discursive practices and entire discourses assessing the justifiability of political (and economic) regimes.




7

This appendix provides readers with basic methodological information pertaining to our empirical study of legitimation discourses in Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the United States. We first describe the procedure used to establish our monitoring and case-study text corpora, and then discuss the reliability of our text selection and coding routines. A more detailed presentation of these topics – as well as the full codebook of our study and other pieces of supplementary information – is available at our website, http://www.sfb597.unibremen.de/ pages/forProjektBeschreibung.php?SPRACHE=en&ID=5.

Text selection Our comparison of national legitimation discourses is based on the analysis of pertinent articles and statements from two opinion-leading quality newspapers with nationwide coverage and readership from each country: Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Tagesanzeiger (Switzerland), Frankfurter Allgemeine and Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), Guardian and Times (Britain), New York Times and Washington Post (United States). Only the Monday to Saturday issues were considered even for those dailies that have Sunday editions. In a first step, the electronic versions of these papers – available through the media database Factiva (http://global.factiva.com) – were searched; relevant articles were downloaded and stored in files generated by MaxQDA, a qualitative text analysis software that allows researchers to link texts with a rectangular data matrix, with a row for each text. In a second step, we identified and coded the legitimation statements contained in these articles. The empirical analysis of discursive structures presented in this book draws on two different text 203 10.1057/9780230275331 - Democracy's Deep Roots, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner


Methodological Appendix

204


●

●

a ‘monitoring’ corpus of 2,374 articles and 3,924 statements published in 2004; a ‘case-study’ corpus of 660 articles and 1,205 statements published during the 1990s and 2000s in the context of three sets of policyrelated debates (see Chapter 2, Table 2.5).

In the following, we explain how the texts and propositions for the two corpora and datasets were selected. In both instances, we relied on our notion of a legitimation grammar, introduced (with examples) in Chapter 2, to classify articles and statements as pertinent or not. Hence only a very specific kind of proposition, which we call legitimation statement, was considered relevant for the purposes of this study. Such propositions, which convey a positive or negative evaluation of specific legitimation objects (LO, see Chapter 3) on the basis of explicit normative standards or legitimation patterns (LP, see Chapter 4), are the basic units of our research. Articles were included in one of the two corpora if they contained one or more legitimation statements. A number of further qualifications are in order. First, propositions of a clearly evaluative kind that do not state the underlying normative standard (‘America is great’, ‘the political system of Germany is illegitimate’, and the like) were treated as borderline cases of communicative (de)legitimation and therefore included as well. Second, the stylized – and hence semantic rather than syntactical – nature of this grammar has to be underlined. Even a quick glance at real-world political communication suggests that legitimation statements may be formulated in a virtually unlimited number of ways, and that they are not necessarily phrased along the grammatical lines of ideal–typical compound sentences taking the form ‘LO x is (il)legitimate because of LP y’. Moreover, it is readily apparent that legitimation statements – many of which are clad in figurative or metaphorical language – may draw on an essentially unlimited vocabulary. For instance, the three core elements of these propositions are frequently spread over more than one sentence – and ‘elliptical’ formulations are also widespread. Only a minority of statements employ the actual word ‘legitimate’ and its derivations or explicitly use the phrase ‘... is (il)legitimate because ...’. More often the affirmative or critical thrust of the evaluation is merely implied by the value-laden character of the LP vocabulary itself (words like (in)efficient, (un)fair, and so on).



corpora and related datasets, both of which were, however, established in the described fashion:

205

In the most extreme case, the whole statement with its LO, LP, and evaluation components may be condensed in a single expression – as in a passing reference to the German Bundestag (federal parliament) as ‘the talk shop in Berlin’. Of course, examples of this kind also illustrate the futility of any attempt to compile a complete dictionary of legitimacyrelated vocabulary – a point to which we shall return below. Third, statements taken from newspaper articles may reflect the author’s own legitimacy assessments, they may come in the form of direct or indirect quotations, or propositions may simply be ascribed to other individuals or groups by the author; (‘according to ... , the political system of Switzerland is ...’; ‘many citizens believe that ...’). However, our study deliberately focused on the textual level, that is, the propositional content of individual legitimation statements, and on the broad structures or trajectories of legitimation discourses. We therefore refrained from coding and examining speaker categories. By the same token, verification of the authenticity or plausibility of claims and beliefs attributed to others by journalists appeared unnecessary. What counted for our purposes was the greater or lesser prevalence of different types of statements at the ‘surface’ of legitimation discourses and public spheres, regardless of their author or accuracy. However, an extension of our grammar to speaker categories could easily be implemented, and would indeed be crucial for more elaborate research into the dynamics and mechanisms of legitimacy-related communicative (inter)action, the composition and strategies of discourse coalitions and discursive elites, or related topics. Finally, our searches were not restricted to any particular section of the examined newspapers. Most legitimation statements are, of course, embedded in political news coverage, commentaries, and editorials. But relevant propositions may also be contained in various other feature pages, and even in rather unexpected types of articles, including movie reviews, sports reporting, and so on. There is no obvious substantive reason for excluding legitimation statements put forward in unlikely places, and one of the key advantages of the routine described here is that it enabled us to search whole newspaper issues for legitimation statements without restricting our attention from the outset to a selection of article types (editorials, and so on), or to newspaper segments such as the front page or the political news section.1 The broad scope of our searches was made possible by the partially automated nature of our routine, as described below. A great number of articles could be discarded in the automated (pre)selection step of the routine, and hence without actually reading them. Yet it is impor-




tant to underline that the ultimate identification of pertinent articles and statements, as well as their coding, entailed a ‘reconstruction’ of manifest content and its ‘translation’ into the framework of the legitimation grammar and its variables. The essentially interpretative nature of article selection and coding, however, proved demanding enough in pre-tests to have them performed by the research team itself rather than delegating them to (student) coders, as is the usual practice (see, for instance, Budge et al. 2001; the reliability of CMP data – which are nevertheless widely used – is, for instance, discussed in Volkens 2001 and criticized in Laver et al. 2003). In this way articles for the two corpora were chosen, and all legitimation statements were coded, by the five authors of the book, namely, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová (Switzerland), Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner (Germany), Achim Hurrelmann (Britain), and Steffen Schneider (United States). Moreover, articles and statements whose relevance or correct coding appeared doubtful to the individual researchers were discussed on a regular basis, and decided upon by consensus by the whole team. This approach enabled us to develop a common understanding of relevant articles and variable categories, to fine-tune the rules for text selection and coding as we went along, and to perform these tasks with increasing speed and accuracy. In light of our team approach to text selection and coding, intercoder reliability tests might, then, appear dispensable; a number of informal pre-tests and formal reliability tests were nevertheless performed, though still taking the partially ‘discursive’ and consensual nature of the text selection and coding procedure into account. Further details of this procedure and the findings of our test for the reliability of the selection procedure are outlined in the next subsection, against the backdrop of the monitoring corpus, before we explain what adaptations were made to establish the case-study corpus. Monitoring corpus Our declared goal in compiling the monitoring corpus was to identify all legitimation statements, or at least as many as possible, published by the examined newspapers in a single year (2004). On the one hand, given the novelty of our text analytical perspective, an especially solid basis for descriptive and explanatory inferences on the structures of Swiss, German, British, and American legitimation discourses (that is, a large N of legitimation statements) seemed appropriate. On the other hand, reading each and every article published in that year was beyond our means. We therefore devised a partially automated search routine, making heavy




207

use of the powerful, sophisticated search engine offered by Factiva. Its first step – which still yielded a considerable number of articles to be read – nevertheless helped us weed out clearly irrelevant texts while at the same time ensuring a minimal number of ‘false negatives’ (articles that are not recognized as pertinent by the automated part of the routine, and hence discarded, even though they contain relevant propositions). The first step of the procedure was dictionary-based and closely tied to the two key variables of our legitimation grammar, objects (LO) and patterns (LP). We thus began by creating small LO and LP dictionaries in English and in German, with the requisite adaptations for national idiosyncracies regarding political terminology and institutional arrangements. For instance, the four versions of the LO dictionary all contain the word ‘parliament’ or ‘Parlament’, as well as the proper names of the legislature and its chambers in each of the four examined political systems – Nationalrat and Ständerat (Switzerland), Bundestag and Bundesrat (Germany), House of Commons and House of Lords (Britain), as well as Congress, House of Representatives and Senate (United States). Conversely, only the British LO dictionary contains an entry related to the monarchy, and so on. In a similar vein, the different versions of the LP dictionary are made up of value-laden words referring to the kinds of normative criteria that we expected to be most prominent in the context of legitimacyrelated propositions – words like (il)legitimate, (in)acceptable or (un)justifiable, (un)democratic, (il)legal or (in)effective, and so on. Finally, the four versions of the dictionaries are not exactly parallel because there may exist a greater or lesser number of synonyms for each dictionary item in English and German, because different truncations were used as necessary and appropriate in the two languages, and because a greater or lesser number of problematic homonyms – whose inclusion would have adversely affected the accuracy of searches – had to be dropped from the word lists or otherwise dealt with in each case (for instance, the search term ‘Staat*’ [without an article] is unproblematic in German, whereas even the phrase ‘the state’ proved highly ineffective but nevertheless had to be included in the English-language searches). The complex word lists employed to retrieve articles from Factiva, then, coupled the LO and the LP dictionaries together as follows: (LO1 or LO2 or ... LOn) same (LP1 or LP2 or ... LPn) Factiva’s ‘same’ operator functions just like a logical ‘and’ but restricts searches to one and the same paragraph, thus making it more likely that the LO and LP vocabulary identified in an article indeed belongs to one




and the same proposition rather than being spread across the entire text, and hence being unrelated. So each of the articles retrieved for further inspection contained at least one paragraph (including the title) with at least one object-related and one pattern-related term from the LO and LP dictionaries. For instance, a paragraph containing the word ‘democracy’ (LO) along with words like ‘(in)effective’ or ‘(un)accountable’ would be identified by our routines. Finally, because of the maximum length of a search request in Factiva (roughly 2,000 letters), the LP portion of the routine had to be split in half (word list 1, word list 2), and each request had to be run twice: LOi same word list 1 (= the first half of the LP vocabulary) LOi same word list 2 (= the second half of the LP vocabulary) Hence we actually used eight different search routines to retrieve articles from Factiva – and articles might have been found by part 1 or 2 of the routines (or by both – in which case we made sure that all paragraphs identified by part 1 or 2 of the search were further considered). We omit these routines here for space reasons but have made them available on our webpage. Again, a couple of further qualifications are in order. First, only the paragraphs actually containing two or more of our search words (highlighted in bold by Factiva) were considered – that is, read – in the second part of our procedure (the final selection of relevant articles), unless the disambiguation of their meaning forced us to consider surrounding paragraphs as well. Second, establishing a more or less closed-ended dictionary of objectrelated search words linked to our hierarchy of legitimation objects proved to be fairly straightforward, as described in Chapter 3. The odd article or paragraph may, of course, refer to a political system or institution in an entirely idiosyncratic fashion, and hence be overlooked by our routines because of the closed-ended nature of the LO vocabulary used. Yet, on the basis of our pre-tests, we have every reason to believe that this happened extremely infrequently. A commentator may, for instance, call a national parliament a ‘talk shop’, as in our example above, but it is most unlikely that he or she will never use its proper name or generic terms like ‘parliament’ or ‘legislature’ throughout the article, or even throughout a single paragraph. Readers might be more suspicious about our LP dictionary, and understandably so. There is obviously no way to construct a similarly closed-ended (and at the same time short) dictionary of value-laden terms – including any number of idiosyncratic ones – that might be




209

used in the context of legitimation statements; journalists or the speakers they cite obviously do not do us the favour of using the signal word ‘(il)legitimate’ whenever they formulate such evaluative propositions. Yet a range of terms suggest themselves, whether against the backdrop of democratic theory (words and expressions like ‘accountable’, ‘responsive’, and ‘popular sovereignty’) or in the light of diagnoses that postulate a transformation of legitimacy away from democratic criteria (‘efficiency’, ‘effectiveness’, and so on). Sometimes a small number of rather obvious signal words (as with ‘efficiency’, etc.) are used in many or most references to the underlying evaluation standard, while other normative criteria are less intimately connected with specific terms. The search words ultimately retained are thus linked to normative criteria prominent in academic debates, or their usefulness was confirmed by way of informal pre-tests, but they do not by any means constitute complete dictionaries of the potentially relevant vocabulary. The unavoidable limitations of our LP vocabulary, of course, raise the issue of ‘false negatives’. Ideally, the automated step of our text selection procedure should have minimized the number of both ‘false negatives’ and ‘false positives’ (articles identified by the Factiva searches that prove irrelevant upon further inspection). As it turns out, however, whereas the search routines were remarkably successful with regard to the first benchmark, they were much less effective in weeding out irrelevant material – that is, articles with no political and legitimacy-related content whatsoever, or merely factual political news reports. To test for the extent to which the automated step of our procedure made us overlook pertinent statements (and articles), a random sample of roughly 200 texts (16.3 per cent of the articles in the monitoring corpus – each text containing exactly one previously identified and coded legitimation statement – was read in full (remember that only the paragraphs containing search words were read initially, and articles were classified as relevant or discarded on that basis). Table 7.1 gives the number of articles considered for each of the four countries (1), the overall number of paragraphs in these articles (2), and the number of paragraphs containing search words (3). As further indicated by the table, the share of paragraphs found to be relevant (4) among the automatically preselected ones may be estimated to be roughly between 30 and 50 per cent for the examined countries, indicating a relatively high – if by no means satisfactory – accuracy of the automated search routines. By contrast, the lower portion of the table shows that the number and share (roughly 2 per cent) of paragraphs containing ‘false negatives’ is low. We are, therefore, confident that our monitoring





Table 7.1

Accuracy of automated search routines (‘false negatives’) CH

(1) number of articles (2) number of paragraphs (3) number of paragraphs with search words (4) … of which: number of paragraphs with legitimation statements

DE

GB

US

Total/Overall

42

61

36

63

202

907 172

1,285 171

851 93

2,185 277

5,228 713

82

84

47

85

298

Ratio (4) / (3)

47.7

49.1

50.5

30.7

41.8

(5) number of paragraphs without search words (6) … of which: number of paragraphs with ‘false negatives’

735

1,114

758

1,908

4,515

9

28

7

39

83

Ratio (6) / (5)

1.2

2.5

0.9

2.0

1.8

corpus does indeed document the vast bulk of legitimation statements made in the examined newspapers over the year 2004. On the other hand, Table 7.1 also indicates the fact that the automated routines still cast much too wide a net, and hence we could not dispense with the close reading of preselected texts. The final selection was made by each of the individual coders alone whenever the (ir)relevance of articles seemed obvious; doubtful cases were discussed and decided upon jointly, and by consensus, during regular sessions of the research team. To test the reliability of this text selection procedure, a formal test of inter-coder reliability was performed on the basis of a random sample of eight days – one for each newspaper – from the year 2004; the use of our automated search routines yielded 124 art icles for those dates (Table 7.2). These articles were read individually by the four team members and coded as relevant, irrelevant or doubtful. Each of the four researchers considered between fourteen and sixteen articles – that is, between 11.3 per cent and 12.9 per cent of the sample – to be relevant, which was a somewhat higher-than-usual share (Table 7.2). However, eleven articles – 8.9 per cent of the sample – were also marked as doubtful cases. As shown in Table 7.3, the levels of pairwise inter-coder agreement (in per cent) are highly satisfactory; all pairs achieve results close to the average value of 91.1 per cent, and no problematic coders emerge.2



210

Methodological Appendix Reliability test, text selection – sample

Newspaper NZZ (word list 1) Tagesanzeiger (word list 2) FAZ (word list 1) SZ (word list 2) Guardian (word list 1) Times (word list 2) New York Times (word list 1) Washington Post (word list 2) Sum

Table 7.3

Number of hits, automated routines

Date 09/16/2004 05/22/2004 03/26/2004 02/09/2004 05/05/2004 08/09/2004 02/28/2004 06/16/2004

14 10 15 17 21 9 26 12

–

124

Reliability test, text selection – findings Pair-wise inter-coder agreement (%)

Coder 1 Coder 2 Coder 3 Coder 4

Coder 1

Coder 2

Coder 3

Coder 4

(100.0) – – –

92.7 (100.0) – –

91.1 90.3 (100.0) –

90.3 91.1 91.1 (100.0)

Case study corpus The case study corpus was established in a comparable fashion but with the objective of identifying the volume and nature of legitimation statements in the context of debates and conflicts related to specific policy issues. As indicated in Chapter 2 (Table 2.5), the text searches were in each case restricted to three-month time windows ‘anchored’ by important events. The specific debates to be examined in the areas of institutional reform, social and foreign policy – as well as the precise time windows – were selected in the following fashion: ●

in a first step, the four country experts of the team scanned policy developments in the three areas for particularly salient issues that, according to the literature, were the subject of intense political conflict and heightened public attention at least once in the (early) 1990s and once in the (late) 1990s or 2000s;



Table 7.2

211

●

●


in a second step, the qualitative picture of attention cycles thus established was confirmed with the help of Factiva by examining the monthly ups and downs of issue-related search words and expressions (‘healthcare reform’, and so on) for the 1990 to 2005 period; the final selection of issues was then made on the basis of the following criteria: substantive importance of the chosen issue or debate; comparability of debates across countries and time periods; existence of a clearly recognizable ‘focusing’ event (parliamentary votes, elections, and so on). The time windows usually begin two months before that event and end a month thereafter (only a few start and end dates were chosen differently for substantive reasons).

Once again, a two-step procedure was employed to identify relevant articles. For the preselection of texts, we now used issue-specific dictionaries and search routines, details of which we also omit here for space reasons but document on our website. The final selection was again made on the basis of a thorough reading of the articles yielded by the Factiva searches; articles containing one or more legitimation statements were retained in the case study corpus.3 Table 7.4 indicates the number of legitimation statements identified and analysed for each time window and country, together with the raw values used to depict intensity and legitimacy levels (Chapter 3), as well as the democratic quality of debates (Chapter 4). Identification and coding of legitimation statements The identification and coding of legitimation statements in the paragraphs containing two or more words from our LO and LP dictionaries followed the construction of our text corpora. A number of subsidiary rules – again, documented in greater detail in our online codebook – were applied to identify legitimation statements and to ‘translate’ them into the variables of the legitimation grammar. The general rule for coders was to avoid any overinterpretation. The object, evaluative character, and positive or negative thrust of would-be statements had to be explicitly stated. Wherever any of these elements could not be disambiguated, propositions were not included. Cases where the ironic or non-ironic tone of propositions, and hence the affirmative or critical thrust of evaluations, remained unclear are apposite here – and so are ‘legitimation statements’ that are presumably implied in various other types of propositions. One could, for instance, argue that conditional sentences (‘if social programs are cut any further, the welfare state will no longer ensure distributive justice’) or political demands (‘we need



212

Case studies, number of statements, and raw values Time window 1 Statements (n)

Time window 2

Intensity level

Legitimacy level

Democratic quality

Statements (n)

Intensity level

Legitimacy level

Democratic quality

CH Inst. reform Foreign policy Social policy

38 143 15

63.6 51.4 25.0

35.2 50.3 53.3

60.8 51.0 69.2

46 46 47

13.2 33.0 15.9

57.9 43.5 31.9

56.6 39.4 39.5

DE Inst. reform Foreign policy Social policy

26 29 40

57.9 23.3 5.8

42.3 33.3 15.0

40.0 22.2 40.6

76 40 20

11.9 10.7 3.1

17.1 41.4 20.0

54.8 10.3 44.4

GB Inst. reform Foreign policy Social policy

78 71 16

20.9 10.8 4.3

16.0 46.0 50.0

55.0 63.3 30.8

142 66 43

14.4 9.9 3.9

44.0 61.0 28.0

50.6 70.7 29.4

US Inst. reform Foreign policy Social policy

28 39 27

11.7 1.3 5.6

19.2 79.5 29.6

76.9 80.6 30.8

37 68 15

23.9 2.4 7.4

54.1 71.6 13.3

42.1 66.2 85.7



Table 7.4


a more democratic judiciary’) presuppose legitimacy assessments (‘the current welfare state ensures distributive justice’; ‘the judiciary in its current form is undemocratic’) – yet coders were instructed to stop short of making far-reaching interpretive steps of this kind. Finally, historical statements (‘the German welfare state of the 1970s was bloated and inefficient’) as well as prognostic ones (‘the German welfare state regime will no longer be viable in a few decades from now’) were ignored. Two final points need to be made. First, legitimation statements may, of course, be more complex than suggested by our grammar in the sense that they include more than one legitimation object or pattern, or weigh up positive and negative assessments against each other; consider the following examples: ●

●

●

‘Congress and the Supreme Court are equally unaccountable’ (two LO); ‘the members of the House of Lords have no democratic legitimacy and are totally ignorant’ (two LP); ‘German federalism may well be inefficient – but it guarantees adequate representation of regional interests) (a weighing of positive and negative assessments).

In each of these scenarios (or where they were combined), our procedure was to break complex statements down into simple ones – one for each LO (Congress, Supreme Court) in case 1, one for each LP (and the House of Lords as LO) in case 2, a delegitimating and a legitimating statement on German federalism in case 3. This, of course, entails a certain loss of information, especially with regard to the third kind of scenario. The procedure, however, greatly facilitated the organization of our datasets, and more complex argumentations are considered to some extent in Chapter 5 of the book. Finally, a maximum of ten (simple) legitimation statements per article was included in the datasets. This limitation – implemented for entirely pragmatic reasons – hardly led to a great loss of pertinent information, given that the average number of legitimation statements per article in our material is only 1.7. Moreover, articles focusing closely on legitimacy-related issues also tend to repeat specific assessments; the instruction was to code (and count) such repeated statements – that is, statements with the same LO, LP, and evaluation (positive or negative) – only once per article. For each statement, we then coded the three variables of our legitimation grammar – legitimation object, whether the evaluation is positive



214

215

or negative, and legitimation pattern – as well as the policy or issue context in which the proposition was made. As with the text selection procedure, the team’s country experts individually coded statements from their respective portion of the corpora (the Swiss, German, British, and American papers, respectively), but doubtful cases were discussed and decided upon jointly. In the following, we restrict ourselves to a few cursory remarks on the variables’ categories and a glance at the results of reliability tests performed for each of them. These reliability tests used the sample of 202 articles (and statements) already drawn on above, for the estimation of ‘false negatives’. More detailed information on the coding schemes and instructions is, again, available in our online codebook, and in the empirical chapters of this book. Legitimation objects (LO, xLO) Our list of legitimation objects (LO) is introduced in Chapter 3 (Table 3.3), as is our hierarchy of four tiers (xLO) of objects (regime principles of the democratic nation state; political community or system as a whole; core political institutions; key actor groups). Overall, the coding of this variable proved straightforward because coders could usually rely on the manifest content of texts and the ‘official’ names of institutions (Congress, Nationalrat, and so on), or on unequivocal generic words and expressions such as ‘direct democracy’ and ‘federalism’. The distinction between references to the political community and the political system as a whole (tier 2 of our hierarchy), together with the correct identification of references to the interest-group system, were perhaps most challenging. But, as illustrated by Table 7.5, the coding of this variable proved to be no problem at the level of individual objects (with an average Table 7.5

Reliability test, object variable – findings Pair-wise inter-coder agreement (%) Coder 1

Coder 2

Coder 3

Coder 4


(100.0) – – –

88.9 (100.0) – –

81.0 92.6 (100.0) –

76.2 85.7 79.9 (100.0)


(xLO = object category) (100.0) 91.0 86.2 – (100.0) 95.2 – – (100.0) – – –

84.7 92.1 88.4 (100.0)




216


agreement of 84.1 per cent between the four coders), and even less so at the aggregate (xLO) level of our four tiers (89.6 per cent).

The coding of this dichotomous variable should not be difficult, perhaps with the (rare) exception of cases where propositions might be read as ironic, and, indeed, a look at the results of our reliability test (Table 7.6) does not suggest any problems (the average agreement is 95.7 per cent). Legitimation patterns (LP, xLP) Our list of legitimation patterns (LP) is introduced in Chapter 4 (Table 4.3), as is our typology of four groups (xLP) of patterns (democratic v. non-democratic, input v. output; Table 4.4) with the residual categories of ‘general’ statements (legitimation pattern unspecified) and ‘other’ patterns. We note in passing that there are, in principle, four rather than two ways to combine each LP with the two categories of the DERELEG variable. A speaker could, for instance, legitimate a political system or institution because it is assessed as being democratic but might also delegitimate it for the same reason. Such cases would certainly merit a sustained qualitative analysis, and they are not necessarily as implausible as they might appear. A constitutional court, for instance, might well be evaluated negatively because it succumbs to democratic and populist pressures (the ‘tyranny of the majority’), and hence because it appears to be ‘too democratic’. Still, the present analysis ignores such unusual cases for the simple reason that they are exceedingly rare – that is, in the vast bulk of statements, the positive and negative version of the evaluation standard used (for instance, effective v. ineffective, fair v. unfair) is coupled with the expected (positive v. negative) thrust of the assessment. This is undoubtedly a demanding variable, if only for the sheer number of its categories. Moreover, it forces coders to grasp the meaning of argumentations that are frequently put forward in rather idiosyncratic Table 7.6

Reliability test, (de)legitimation variable – findings Pair-wise inter-coder agreement (%)

N = 193

Coder 1

Coder 2

Coder 3

Coder 4


(100.0) – – –

97.4 (100.0) – –

95.3 97.9 (100.0) –

93.2 95.8 94.8 (100.0)



Positive or negative evaluation (DERELEG)

Methodological Appendix Table 7.7

217

Reliability test, pattern variable – findings

Coder 1

Coder 2

Coder 3

Coder 4


(100.0) – – –

88.0 (100.0) – –

78.7 90.7 (100.0) –

74.9 77.6 69.9 (100.0)


(100.0) – – –

(xLP = pattern group) 89.6 83.1 (100.0) 93.4 – (100.0) – –

Table 7.8

72.1 80.3 74.3 (100.0)

Reliability test, issue variable – findings Pair-wise inter-coder agreement (%)


Coder 1

Coder 2

Coder 3

Coder 4

(100.0) – – –

85.6 (100.0) – –

72.2 86.1 (100.0) –

69.0 82.9 69.5 (100.0)

terms. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the average inter-coder agreement at the level of individual and aggregate patterns (xLP) (80.0 and 82.1 per cent, respectively) is somewhat lower than the corresponding values for the (x)LO and DERELEG variables. Still, the values seem entirely adequate for our exploratory study. Issue context Finally, for each statement, we identified the policy or issue context in which it was made – is the paragraph that contains the statement dealing, for instance, with issues of foreign or social policy, or with institutional reform (Chapter 3, Table 3.1)? Where necessary, coders could infer the issue context from surrounding text or from the entire article where a reading of the paragraph itself did not make the issue explicit enough. Here, too, a glance at the results of our reliability tests indicates somewhat greater inconsistency (with an average pairwise intercoder agreement of 77.6 per cent) than for the other coding decisions, although again the overall level of agreement seems adequate.



Pair-wise inter-coder agreement (%)

Finally, as mentioned above, the complete text corpora have been stored as MaxQDA files, and hence remain accessible for qualitative analyses. The legitimation statements were initially coded in MaxQDA as well, and the resulting data matrices were exported to SPSS for our quantitative analyses (two versions of this data matrix exist: the original spreadsheet format – as imported from MaxQDA – with case rows referring to articles with one or several legitimation statements, and one with case rows referring to the individual legitimation statements; this latter version was used for our univariate analyses and cross-tabulations).




1 Introduction: A Legitimacy Crisis of the Democratic Nation State? 1. The Eurobarometer data may be found at http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb68/eb_68_en.pdf; Swiss and American electoral participation data at http://www.politik-stat.ch/nrw2007CHwb_de.html and http:// elections.gmu.edu/Turnout_2008G.html. 2. Here we deliberately gloss over a number of differentiations and ambigu ities in Easton’s own presentations of these concepts (1965, 1975), and in the various adaptations and refinements suggested by the public opinion literature following Easton’s seminal work. Easton himself, for instance, admits to the ‘complicated relationship between outputs and diffuse support’ as the latter ‘may be a product of spill-over effects from evaluations of a series of outputs and of performance over a long period of time’ (Easton 1975: 446). He and many other authors sometimes appear to equate specific with output-based support. By contrast, we believe that the defining characteristic of specific support should not be the set of criteria in which it is grounded – namely, input v. output-based ones – but rather its ‘quid pro quo’ nature. Hence support based on the satisfaction of an individual’s demands (and nothing else) is specific while diffuse support may well be based on a ‘generalized’ use of output criteria such as efficiency and effectiveness, or distributive justice (see Gilley 2006b: 502, and Chapter 4). What is more, the ‘other’ types of diffuse support remain quite anaemic, and this is why we use the terms legitimacy and diffuse support in an essentially interchangeable fashion – for us, a regime that enjoys this kind of support is legitimate, and vice versa. Note, for instance, that the two alternative types of diffuse support in Easton (1965) – ‘symbols of the common interest’ and ‘identification with the political community’ – are more or less replaced with the notion of trust in Easton’s review of his own and related work ten years later (1975: 447–50). Yet the category of trust is itself highly problematic. Where it is defined as the feeling of ‘members ... that their own interests [are] attended to’ (1975: 447), it becomes indistinguishable from specific support. Where it is defined as the belief ‘that the regime’s goals, rules and structures ... can be trusted to provide outcomes equitable to all’ (448), we may speak of diffuse support, based on the criteria of distributive justice or credibility. Much of the subsequent literature arguably complicates things further – for instance, Muller’s (1970) equation of trust with Easton’s personal type of legitimacy on the one hand, and his distinction of instrumental, expressive and extraneous types of specific support on the other, appear even more confusing than Easton’s own discussion (see Easton 1975: 442, 453). 3. On the legitimacy and democratic quality of the EU, see Wallace 1993; Andersen and Eliassen 1996; Abromeit 1998; Føllesdal and Koslowski 219 10.1057/9780230275331 - Democracy's Deep Roots, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Zuzana Krell-Laluhová, Frank Nullmeier and Achim Wiesner


Notes

Notes

1998; Banchoff and Smith 1999; Schmitt and Thomassen 1999; SánchezCuenca 2000; Schmitter 2000; Lord and Beetham 2001; Rohrschneider 2002; Barker 2003; Lord and Magnette 2004; Mair 2005; Føllesdal 2006, 2007; Schmidt 2006; DeBardeleben and Hurrelmann 2007; KohlerKoch and Rittberger 2007; Hix 2008. On international legitimacy more broadly, see Hurd 1999; Coicaud and Heiskanen 2001; Stein 2001; Clark 2003; Bernstein 2004; Ribeiro Hoffmann and van der Vleuten 2007; Breitmeier 2008; Schmitt-Beck et al. 2008; Charlesworth and Coicaud 2009; Take 2009. On the issue of legitimacy and civil society, NGOs, or (public–)private governance arrangements, see Brunnengräber et al. 2001; Pauly 2002; van Rooy 2004; Beisheim 2005; Collingwood 2006; Bekkers 2007; Dingwerth 2007. 4. We are, of course, aware that to a certain extent we are using this particular quotation as a straw man. Yet the general criticism advanced here is justified for a considerable part of the literature. 5. Although we are going to use it, the notion of democratic legitimacy is somewhat ambiguous precisely because it suggests that this match is unproblematic. Yet, as indicated by our own empirical material, the legitimacy of the democratic nation state may be grounded in all kinds of criteria, not just democratic ones. 6. This typology is, in fact, close to the one proposed by Richard Hofferbert and Hans-Dieter Klingemann (2001). They distinguish between satisfied democrats (corresponding to secure democratic legitimacy), dissatisfied democrats (crisis type I), dissatisfied non-democrats (type II), and satisfied non-democrats (type III).

2 The Communicative Dimension of Legitimacy: A Text Analytical Perspective 1. Dryzek’s sweeping claim that public opinion research contributes to the legitimation of the Western world’s economic and political order is, for instance, hard to reconcile with the fact that public opinion research is the main source of evidence for some of the most prominent crisis diagnoses (and their ‘erosion of legitimacy’ hypothesis). 2. An interesting differentiation is offered by Claus Offe (2006: 24–5). He links the notion of disaffection with ‘passions’ (a sense of belonging to – and identification with – political communities), dissatisfaction with the rational pursuit of ‘interests’ (and markets), (il)legitimacy with the giving of ‘reasons’ (and regimes). This is mostly in line with our own definition of legitimacy, although we will also consider political communities as objects of legitimation discourses. 3. One might, of course, decide to perform elite surveys, but this is hardly a widespread practice, and even that kind of survey would be plagued by the shortcomings outlined here. 4. A well-known line of reasoning, for instance, holds that the very proliferation of social movements indicates the ‘limits of majority rule’, and hence a legitimacy crisis of representative democracy or conventional forms of participation in the age of global threats related to nuclear proliferation, environmental risks, and so on (Guggenberger 1978).



220

5. Easton’s position as to the relationship between the attitudinal and the behavioural dimensions of legitimacy, or each dimension’s importance, however, ultimately remains ambiguous. The cited propositions stand in contrast to the notion that there is an ‘objective’ quality to behaviour that renders the examination of its links with attitudes or motives all but unnecessary – levels of support could, then, be directly inferred from the observation of behaviour: ‘Regardless of how a member may say he feels about an object, if the objective consequences of his actions are such as to lend aid and comfort or to oppose and undermine, he has extended or withheld support’ (1965: 159). In yet another turnabout, Easton suggests that ‘[i]n many cases, the ability to detect accurately the existence of covert support, or supportive states of mind, is far more important than its actual expression in overt behavior’ (161). Our own position is simply that there need not be congruence between the attitudinal and behavioural dimensions of legitimacy, and that, for the reasons given above, public opinion research may not be the best way to gauge the motives underlying acts of support or dissent. 6. Easton, however, briefly suggests that the design and use of coats of arms, national holidays, and inaugurations – the ‘ritual[s] surrounding the accession to offices of authority’ (1965: 301) – function as ‘mechanisms through which a system will strive to build up the validity of those who occupy positions in the structure of the regime’ (301), and Barker (2001) also highlights the importance of ritualistic legitimation practices and what one might call a fourth, symbolic dimension of legitimacy. 7. To be sure, the importance of examining public debates on the legitimacy beliefs and claims of different actors has occasionally been suggested and corroborated with anecdotal evidence (Barker 1990, 2001; Beetham 2001) but not translated into an empirical research programme. A vast body of political communication research and discourse analytical literature has assessed the importance of communication and discourses for the functioning of political orders and decision-making processes – or the ‘legitimation’ of specific policies – without a clear and sustained focus on the legitimacy of Western democracies as defined for the purposes of our study (Gamson and Modigliani 1989; Deacon and Golding 1994; Denton and Woodward 1998; Perloff 1998; Norris 2000; Ferree et al. 2002; Callaghan and Schnell 2005). The approach and preoccupations of Raufer (2005) are closest to ours, but, due to his focus on a handful of speeches delivered during a single parliamentary debate in Germany, and his exclusive reliance on hermeneutic methods, the scope and generalizability of his empirical material are restricted, and hence it cannot sustain broader inferences on the legitimacy of the democratic nation state. 8. We do not probe the relative weight of the attitudinal, behavioural, and communicative dimensions of legitimacy in this book, although the Conclusion briefly returns to this question. In methodological terms, a combination of approaches and indicators in the logic of ‘triangulation’ (Flick 2008) seems promising. 9. Our notion of legitimation discourses is, in fact, not too far removed from Easton’s concept of legitimating ideologies, which, according to him, serve as ‘a context within which the authorities as well as the political structure and related norms may themselves be tested for their legitimacy’ (1965: 289). Although competing ideologies of this kind may exist in a given society, all of them tend to function as important resources of support



Notes 221

10.

11.

12.

13.

Notes for a regime. Finally, given that these legitimating ideologies are conceptualized as ‘only the articulated or verbalized part’ of the basic principles and value orientations of a regime, a discourse analytical perspective would appear to be the method of choice for their study. While we touch upon the Foucaultian themes of knowledge and power here, it will be readily apparent that our notion of discourses is intentionally ‘light’. It has none of the normative implications of Habermasian discourse ethics (Habermas 1984, 1987, 2001a; Chambers 1996) or critical discourse theory (Fairclough 2001; Hirseland and Schneider 2001; Wodak and Meyer 2001). See also Nonhoff (2004, 2006, 2007) on the notion of (hegemony in) discourses. However, there is some evidence of rising levels of communicative interaction across national boundaries, too, at least in the European context. The spatial extent of public spheres and legitimation discourses should indeed be affected by economic globalization, the growing importance of transnational media, and the shift of political authority to international regimes and supranational organizations such as the EU. The transnationalization and Europeanization of legitimation discourses may, then, foster a couple of developments: the inclusion of supranational objects of legitimation, more frequent borrowings from other national discourses in terms of framings and patterns of legitimation, or the more frequent use of comparative and relational strategies of (re)legitimation. While the first two aspects must remain largely unexplored at this time, we briefly consider the third in Chapter 5. While it is true, then, that the notion of legitimacy presupposes the ‘ability of citizens to make autonomous judgments’ (Gilley 2006b: 501), their normative positions may be less explicit, consistent, and elaborate than those provided by this body of work. Only a minority of people are likely to refer to it consciously and systematically when they evaluate the legitimacy of a regime and justify their assessments. Without necessarily being aware of their sources, most others probably draw on some of the evaluative benchmarks provided by the literature but not others, perhaps using them in an imprecise, erroneous, and contradictory way, or along with ad hoc, idiosyncratic, and possibly even incompatible non-democratic standards. Still others are likely to shun democratic criteria altogether. In short, there may be a considerable disconnect between ‘average’ people and theorists – or even between elites and theorists – with regard to the nature and ‘sophistication’ of legitimacy beliefs and claims. Of course, it remains true that the quality press is little more than a segment of the mass-media arena, and caution is obviously required when generalizations are drawn from legitimation discourses in this type of newspaper. We do not contend that they simply reflect the structures of broader media discourses, let alone discourses in other arenas. Just like the relationship between the attitudinal, behavioural, and communicative dimensions of legitimacy in the (re)production or transformation of legitimacy, the specific roles and interaction of various media, as well as the roles and interaction of the media and other discursive arenas, ultimately have to be researched systematically but cannot be explored here. One might, for instance, seek to establish which structures and hegemonic positions



222

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

characterize legitimation discourses in each arena; when authoritative voices from other discursive fields are called upon to corroborate positions; which speakers or texts are instrumental in creating linkages between the different arenas; which factors determine the relative weight of these voices and arenas; and how some of them manage to achieve dominance. The third ‘slot’ might remain empty if no explicit argument is given. This, however, should be relatively infrequent if the discursive practice of legitimation is indeed tied to legitimacy, as defined above, and hence understood as an explicit and normatively grounded form of regime support. Note that this grammar is very close to Gilley’s (2006b: 500–1) definition, which ‘covers the subjects (citizens), object (state, holding and exercising political power), orientation (rightful), variable type ... and expressions ... of state legitimacy’. According to Merelman, ‘the relationship between deep cultural structures and various surface attitudes and values is analogous to the linguistic distinction between grammar and speech act. Just as grammar permits a constrained variety of meaningful sentences, so does every deep structure of culture permit a constrained variety of attitudinal configurations. Ultimately, these configurations crystallize into a unique political culture’ (1989: 475). The legitimacy of internationalized governance arrangements and the relationships between legitimacy assessments of national and international political regimes or institutions are largely beyond the purview of this book, although such relationships will be briefly addressed in Chapter 5 and the Conclusion. The choice of newspapers has a pragmatic rationale, too. These papers were available – and searchable – in electronic format, and much prominent content analytical work in political communication research draws on the same or comparable sets of papers to cover the mainstream of national media discourses (for many, see Gaskell and Bauer 2001; Wessler et al. 2008). Given our operationalization of relevant articles as all those that contain at least one legitimation statement, as well as the partial automation of the search routine, no further sampling decisions or procedures, such as a preselection of newspaper sections or relevant text types, were required. However, as explained in the Appendix, the automated first step of this routine is bound to produce a small percentage of ‘false negatives’ – that is, relevant statements that were overlooked.

3 How Stable is the Legitimacy of the Democratic Nation State? 1. Of these, 879 articles contained more than one legitimation statement. 2. In this respect, mass-media debates differ from debates in other discursive arenas. Discussions in academic circles and specialized publications, for instance, are clearly less volatile. This reduced volatility might explain why academics have often perceived legitimacy crises when public attitudes – or mass-media discourses – did not corroborate this conclusion.



Notes 223

3. Incidentally, the definition of thresholds beyond which a legitimacy crisis has to be diagnosed is a problem that also exists in the interpretation of survey results and observational data. 4. The definition of these thresholds is based on the highest and the lowest intensity level encountered in our material – 1.3 per cent in the US case study on the first Iraq War (1991), in which articles containing legitimation statements virtually disappeared among intensive war-related reporting, and 63.3 per cent in the Swiss case study on institutional reform (1995), in which most articles focused on the legitimacy of direct democracy (see Methodological Appendix). We then divided this spectrum into three classes of equal size. We thus speak of a highly intensive legitimation debate if more than 42 per cent of all articles on a policy issue contained legitimation statements, of medium intensity if the share of articles with legitimation statements was between 21 per cent and 42 per cent, and of low intensity if it was below 21 per cent. 5. ‘Die direkte Demokratie verhindert also nicht Reformen, stoppt aber fast immer Machtdemonstrationen. Schlecht ist das nicht. ... Die Mitsprache des Volkes stärkt Reformvorhaben, weil sie gut abgestützt werden’. 6. ‘Das ist der wunde, aber wichtige Punkt: Das Grundgesetz ist aufklärerisch, säkular geprägt. Es ergreift also Partei, auch gegenüber Religionen, die Menschen nicht als Individuen begreifen, sondern als Teil eines gegen Andersgläubige gerichteten, missionarischen Ganzen oder einer Heilsgeschichte. ... Deutschland braucht keine neue Leitkultur. Es hat längst eine, die Grundgesetz-Kultur. Eine bessere gibt es nicht’.

4

How Democratic is the Legitimacy of the Nation State?

1. In the Federal Republic of Germany, the concept of a chain of legitimation has been taken up by the Constitutional Court (starting with BVerfGE 47, 253–85). The Federal Constitutional Court thus stipulates the existence of an ‘uninterrupted chain of legitimation from the people to the institutions and actors endowed with state authority’ as the foundation of democratic legitimacy. See Böckenförde (1991: especially 302) for a theoretical justification of, and elaboration on, this principle. 2. The number of identified legitimation patterns is, in fact, even larger than suggested by Table 4.1. Included in our material are unspecific evaluations that do not make the underlying criterion explicit – we refer to these as ‘general’ (‘unspecified’) legitimation statements. Moreover, a range of highly idiosyncratic patterns, each of which occurred rather infrequently, was subsumed under the category of ‘other patterns’. 3. Here the legitimating tendency of the statements referring to the protection of human rights is outweighed by the delegitimating tendency of statements referring to democratic empowerment and the common good (that is, institutions are criticized for disempowering citizens and catering to special interests). 4. Demands for moderation may also entail references to style, taste, or appropriateness, a quasi-aesthetic dimension. Such explicitly aesthetic criteria are, in fact, represented among the identified legitimation patterns in our ‘other’ category.



224 Notes

Notes 225

1. The actual number of interrelated statements is likely to be higher. The reason for this is that some topics are so prominent at a given time that merely hinting at them evokes delegitimating evaluations without the need to explicitly restate them, for they are likely to have been articulated in other articles a few days or weeks previously and may therefore be assumed to be known by attentive readers. References to specific delegitimations, in such cases, are established simply via keywords, either concerning their topic (‘Abu Ghraib’) or their author – for instance, ‘Habermas’s assessment is misleading here ...’. If we take such intertextual references into account, the number of relegitimations that react to delegitimating statements is likely to be higher than the number of actual cooccurrences of negative and positive evaluations within single paragraphs. 2. Or, as Eco (1992: 64) puts it: ‘The text’s intention is not displayed by the textual surface .... One has to decide to “see” it. It is possible to speak of the text’s intention only as a result of a conjunction on the part of the reader’. 3. Thus relegitimation can be achieved in several ways. An author might use a delegitimation as a rhetorical device, first bringing it forward and then rejecting it himself on the grounds of a second, positive evaluation; an author might also quote another person’s delegitimating statement and contest it, or he or she (in all probability a journalist) might draw entirely on other authors’ statements in combining delegitimating and legitimating evaluations. We do not make any distinction between these (and probably more) means of relegitimation, since they all represent the same textual strategy. 4. ‘Geht wirklich nichts mehr in der direkten Demokratie? ... . Die direkte Demokratie ist reformfähig, aber man muss ihr echte Reformen vorlegen. ... Parlament und Bundesrat sollten endlich den Mut aufbringen, dem Volk Reformen vorzulegen, die diesen Namen auch verdienen’. 5. For an exhaustive overview of relational as well as comparative orientations, see Nullmeier (2000). 6. ‘Gut ausgebaute Volksrechte verzögern zwar den politischen Entscheidungsprozess, aber sie verhindern Trotzreaktionen des Souveräns. Mithin generieren sie politische Stabilität’. 7. ‘Einen einzigen Wert gibt es, der nach wie vor völlig ungeteilte Zustimmung findet: der Glaube an den Sinn der direkten Demokratie. Sie übt eine massive integrative Kraft aus. Nach wie vor akzeptieren wir Volksentscheide klaglos – auch wenn wir in der Minderheit sind. Die direkte Demokratie ist der einzige Wert, der vom Wertekonflikt nicht betroffen ist’. 8. ‘Eine Studie des Think-Tanks “Avenir Suisse” unternimmt den Versuch, die Ursachen der schweizerischen Wachstumsschwäche und der ihr zugrunde liegenden Reformblockade zu orten. Nach Ansicht der Autoren leidet die Schweiz an einem Zuviel der schweizerischen Institutionen Föderalismus, Konkordanz und direkte Demokratie’. 9. ‘Geht wirklich nichts mehr in der direkten Demokratie? Kann man das aus dem dreifachen “Nein” vom letzten Abstimmungswochenende herauslesen? Ich möchte vor voreiligen Schlüssen warnen. Aufgewachsen in einem Landsgemeindekanton, habe ich ein Urvertrauen in die direkte Demokratie. Die direkte Demokratie ist reformfähig, aber man muss ihr echte Reformen



5 Relegitimation Strategies: Countering Threats to the Legitimacy of Political Systems

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

Notes vorlegen. ... Wenn schon Reformen vorgeschlagen werden, sollten diese die Probleme auch wirklich lösen. ... Wie aber soll es in der Politik nun weitergehen? Parlament und Bundesrat sollten endlich den Mut aufbringen, dem Volk Reformen vorzulegen, die diesen Namen auch verdienen ...’. ‘Die Blockierung, die zur Zeit auf Bundesebene zu beobachten ist, kommt nicht vom Souverän und hat nichts mit einer Krise der direkten Demokratie zu tun. Sie hat damit zu tun, wie die Parteien ihre Aufgabe verstehen’. ‘Es sind nicht nur die Volksrechte der direkten Demokratie, die zu einer Reformblockade führen. Es sind Macht und Einfluss von Interessengruppen, denen es gelingt, den Status quo gegen Veränderungen zu verteidigen’. ‘Keine tieferen Steuern, höhere Steuern erst recht nicht und eine sanfte Reform der AHV auch nicht. Nichts geht mehr. Zum zweiten Mal in diesem Jahr hat das Volk drei Vorlagen von Bundesrat und Parlament haushoch verworfen. In andern Ländern hätte ein solch geballtes Misstrauensvotum zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik zwingend einen Regierungswechsel zur Folge. In der Schweiz mit ihrer halbdirekten Demokratie und einer Konkordanzregierung nicht, weil er systembedingt keine Wende zum Besseren brächte. ... Ob Steuern, Sozialwerke, Verkehr oder Wohneigentum, der Wille zu mehrheitsfähigen Lösungen schwindet. Der Reformstau der Schweiz in zentralen Feldern der Politik wird offensichtlich. Der Verweis auf schiefe und schlecht geschnürte Abstimmungspakete allein löst diese Blockade nicht. Regieren in einer Konkordanzregierung muss für die Parteien wieder mehr werden als die kompromisslose Maximierung von Partikularinteressen und Wähleranteilen’. ‘Nur wenn es gelingt, die Einsicht zu vermitteln, dass die Mehrheit der Bevölkerung zur Wahrung ihrer langfristigen Interessen Entscheide treffen und akzeptieren muss, die kurzfristig negativ oder sogar schmerzhaft sein mögen, wird der Stillstand überwunden werden können; das ist in der direkten Demokratie nicht anders als in der repräsentativen. Wenn schon, denn schon ist nicht die direkte Demokratie eine Reformbremse, sondern das Mehrheitsprinzip, weil Mehrheiten ihre “wohlerworbenen” Rechte mit Klauen und Krallen zu verteidigen versuchen.’ ‘Der politische Stillstand gehört zur (halb-)direkten Demokratie. Im Gegensatz zu einer indirekten Demokratie kann in einem direktdemokratischen System jeder einzelne Reformschritt mittels der Volksrechte bekämpft werden. ... So weit das Lehrbuch. Nun zeigt aber ein Blick über die Grenzen, dass in Deutschland und Frankreich auch indirekte Demokratien unfähig zu weit reichenden Reformen sind. Also hat der politische Stillstand möglicherweise weniger mit der (halb-)direkten Demokratie als vielmehr generell etwas mit der Demokratie zu tun. Es sind nicht nur die Volksrechte der direkten Demokratie, die zu einer Reformblockade führen. Es sind Macht und Einfluss von Interessengruppen, denen es gelingt, den Status quo gegen Veränderungen zu verteidigen’.

6 Conclusion: Broadening the Agenda of Legitimacy Research 1. First forays into communication related to the legitimacy of the G8 summit regime over the last ten years in Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the



226

US indicate consistently low levels of legitimacy (see Gronau et al. 2009; Nonhoff et al. 2009). 2. Also see the burgeoning survey-based literature on the relationship between national-level and EU-related legitimacy beliefs (Anderson 1998; Gabel 1998; Rohrschneider 2002; Scharpf 2007, 2009). 3. One might doubt the appropriateness of considering firms as legitimation objects. After all, the survival of individual corporations is immaterial for the survival of market economies as a whole, which are even defined by the possibility of individual corporations’ failure. Hence one could plausibly ask whether firms are not simply replaceable elements of markets, just as individual parties or the incumbents of government and parliamentary offices are replaceable elements of political systems. Such a view would entail an analogy between markets, rather than individual firms, on the one hand and nation states on the other. Yet this seems wrong, given that individual nation states, too, may dissolve – and the fragmentation or merger of any particular nation states would not necessarily affect the survival and legitimacy of the democratic nation state’s basic principles and institutions, as explained in Chapter 3. In the following, major corporations are treated as the equivalent of nation states: like individual nation states, large corporations may dissolve or fail, but they are important elements of the economic system, and hence their legitimacy matters. 4. The stability of national regimes might also be understood as an effect of so far well-functioning, highly legitimate markets and corporations. In this view, political legitimacy is underpinned by economic success – an interpretation that is frequently used when the swift, successful (re)introduction of democracy in post-war Germany is explained. One could even turn this argument around and formulate the inverse hypothesis that the economic sphere functions as a shock-absorber for the legitimacy problems of political entities. But that may be no more than a different formulation of the transformationof-legitimacy hypothesis – a transformation in the direction of output legitimacy (see our crisis scenario III).

7 Methodological Appendix 1. Factiva also offers the option to exclude a small number of prima facie irrelevant text types (event schedules, stock price listings, obituaries, weather reports, and so on), which we used. 2. We are well aware of the fact that inter-coder agreement given in percentages has its drawbacks as a measure of reliability. It does not account for chance agreement and may, therefore, be considered as too ‘liberal’. Yet measures such as Scott’s pi, Cohen’s kappa, or Krippendorff’s alpha ‘have been criticized as being overly conservative, giving credit only to agreement beyond chance, a tough challenge in the case of extreme distributions’ (Neuendorf 2002: 151). Many of the coding decisions whose reliability we tested were, in fact, made challenging by such extreme distributions (as with the selection of texts), or by a complex and highly differentiated coding scheme (as with legitimation objects and patterns); note also that achieving high reliability scores is more challenging where latent – as opposed to manifest – content is coded (Neuendorf 2002: 146; Riffe et al. 1998: 107). The reported scores



Notes 227

Notes

should be assessed – and seem quite adequate – in light of these considerations, especially if it is borne in mind that a substantial number of articles and legitimation statements were selected and coded by the entire team (a feature that is not even captured by the scores – which are ‘conservative’ in that sense – but obviously reduces the level of inconsistency in our data). Finally, we follow Lacy and Riffe (1996) in compensating a lower assumed level of reliability in the ‘population’ (the entire dataset) with sample sizes which tend towards the higher end of the ‘industry standard’ of as few as fifty cases (Neuendorf 2002: 159). 3. We used CD-ROMs and archives in the two instances where not all case-study years are covered by Factiva (FAZ, Tagesanzeiger).



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244 References

accountability, 7, 129–30, 141–4, 175, 181, 184, 197, 200 affection, disaffection, 21, 186, 220 agenda-setting, 39, 64–5, 68, 78 alienation, 21, 29, 129, 186 allegiance, 21 Almond, Gabriel and Sidney Verba, 106 see also political cultures; public opinion research, surveys anthropology, 32 anti-nuclear energy movement, see nuclear energy and proliferation; see also social movements apathy, 4, 11, 22, 26, 73, 157–8, 186 Aristotle, 124 Ashdown, Paddy, 43, 59 see also Great Britain authoritarian (dictatorial) regimes, 6, 51, 153 see also socialist regimes; totalitarian regimes

capitalism, 6–7, 54, 195–9, 200, 220, 227 see also financial markets; free trade; political economy causal inferences, 9, 20, 22, 35–6, 50 central banks, 197 charisma, charismatic leadership, 51, 120, 122–3 see also Weber, Max critical citizens, 21, 28, 69, 128, 140–1, 186 civil liberties, 28, 134, 137–8, 146, 148, 151–2 see also freedom; human rights civic engagement, 28 codebook (webpage), 203 collective action, actors, 25, 135 collective will, 134–5 common (public) good, 106, 122, 133, 142, 145–6, 224 Commonwealth, 176–7 communitarianism, 109 Comparative Politics, 189 compliance, 3–4, 5, 17, 25, 27, 33 see also political obligations confidence, 21, 63, 80, 140 conflict, 2, 17, 30–1, 41, 69, 78, 103–4, 121, 124, 146, 151, 153, 190 consensus, 10, 28, 73, 78, 91 constitutions, constitutionalism, 1–2, 6, 50–1, 54–5, 85, 90, 93, 95, 96–8, 164, 169, 196–9 constitutional courts, 64, 138, 148–150, 163, 224 constitutional reforms, 62–3, 65–6, 75–6, 84, 96, 97, 123, 144, 148–50, 175–6 constitutional sovereignty, 105–6 constitutional theory, 104, 135 consumer sovereignty, 197–8 see also sovereignty

Barker, Rodney, 21, 23, 24, 36, 37, 221 Beck, Ulrich, 136–7 Beetham, David, 17, 21, 108 Beliefs in Government (book series), 19 Berelson, Bernard, 56 see also text analysis bicameralism, 51 Blair, Tony, 65–6, 77, 150, 152 see also Great Britain blame avoidance, 170, 171 Blunkett, David, 66 see also Great Britain bureaucracy, 6, 38–9, 50, 83, 108, 190 Bush, George, Sr, 152–3 see also United States Bush, George W., 64, 129, 158–9, 161, 166 see also United States 245



Index

Index

corporations, 8, 11, 195–9, 227 corporate governance, 196 corporate scandals, 200 multinational corporations (‘global players’), 195–6 see also capitalism; financial markets; free trade; political economy correlation, see causal inferences corruption, 147–8, 196 credibility, 115, 129, 132, 145, 168, 197, 219 cynicism, 21, 29 data CMP (Comparative Manifestos Project) data, 206 cross-national datasets, 25 natural data, 25, 37 deliberation, 33, 109, 130–1, 142–4, 151–2, 191 democracy consensus democracy, 47, 89, 116, 125 deliberative democracy, see deliberation direct democracy, 82, 137–8, 139, 150–1, 159, 161–2, 169–73, 180–1, 224 liberal democracy, 54 parliamentary democracy, 6, 50–1, 66, 82, 84, 91, 105 participatory democracy, 130–1, 133, 136 presidential democracy, 50–1, 82 representative democracy, 1, 9, 28, 33, 47, 84, 220; see also representation, representative government Westminster democracy, 47, 49, 76, 82, 115, 124 democracy measurement, 3 democratic nation state, 1–2, 7–8, 9–10, 54–5, 68, 72, 82–3, 93, 134, 140, 179–82, 183–5, 199–201, 227 democratic deficits, 200 democratic empowerment, 111, 133, 224

democratic quality, 1–2, 3, 7–8, 11, 33, 117–8, 127–34, 134–140, 140–1, 179, 186, 193–4, 198, 200, 219–20 democratic theory, 3, 10, 12, 27, 81–2, 103, 128, 132, 134, 137, 140, 154, 191 critical perspectives, 130–1 realist perspectives, 28, 109, 111 demos, 82–3 deparliamentarization, 9, 50, 58, 70, 72 see also internationalization (political) Deutsch, Karl W., 38 deviance, deviant behavior, 26 dictionaries, 205, 207–9, 212 discourses communicative v. coordinative discourses, 48–9 discourse coalitions, 34 discursive acts, discursive practices, 32, 34–5, 42, 49, 223 discursive arenas, 36, 37–41, 51, 183, 222–3 discursive cultures, 17 discursive elites, 34 discursive entrepreneurs, 39 discursive strategies, 77, 137, 155–60, 179, 198 see also legitimation discourses; mass media; political communication; public spheres dissent, 25–31, 153, 186, 221 see also Easton, support domestic policy, 60, 71 see also foreign policy; social policy Downs, Anthony, 63–8 Easton, David ideological, structural and personal foundations of legitimacy, 5, 107–8 political community, regime, authorities, 4, 16, 79–80, 106–8, 188–190, 195–197 support, diffuse v. specific, covert v. overt indicators of, 3–5, 17, 19, 21–2, 23–4, 25–31, 34



246

economic policy, 60, 62, 70–2, 172 economic theory, 197 Eco, Umberto, 160 effectiveness, efficiency, 8, 110–11, 115–20, 121–2, 125–6, 130, 140, 141–4, 144–8, 151, 161–2, 164, 168–73, 193, 197–8, 199–201, 219 ‘effective numbers’ (of parties, legitimation objects and patterns), 93–4, 114–5 elections electoral abstention, participation, voter turnout, 28–9, 186, 219 electoral campaigns, 123, 148–50, 184 electoral systems, 29, 64–5, 76, 84, 92–3, 96–7, 148–50, 158–9, 161, 162, 163, 166–8, 175–6, 191 Enlightenment, 90, 107 environmental movement, 132, 220 see also social movements epistemic communities, 121 equality, 23, 64, 124, 128, 134–5, 191 essential contestedness, 2 Europe Council of Europe, 177 Eastern Europe, 148 European Commission, 189 European Human Rights Convention, 149 European integration, 10–11, 38, 98, 178 European Parliament, 175 EU Constitution, 66, 71 European Union (EU), 8, 46, 77, 98, 109, 110, 126, 175, 176–7, 188–94, 219–20 exit, voice, and loyalty, see Hirschman, Albert O. experts, expert and scientific knowledge, 7, 108, 120, 121–2, 122–3, 151, 191, 222 fairness, 64, 168 federalism, 50, 62, 75–6, 84, 92, 97, 144–5 financial markets, 197, 200 First World War, 104

foreign policy, 60–2, 71–2, 77–8, 91, 97–8, 103, 142, 146, 151–2, 211 see also domestic policy; social policy frames, framing, 31, 33, 35, 39–40, 56–7, 71, 77, 122, 152, 165, 184, 189, 222 France ancien régime and its restoration, Bourbon dynasty, 6, 103 Napoleonic Empire, 103 republic, 103 see also revolutions freedom, 132, 134–5, 137, 145, 153, 197 see also free trade; civil liberties; human rights free trade, 197 see also capitalism; financial markets; political economy generational justice, 133 see also justice genetics, 29 Germany and the EU, 50, 71, 144 checks and balances, 115 constitutional reforms, 84, 97, 123, 144 debate on headscarves, 121 debate on torture, 68 East Germany (GDR), 144 federalism, federal reform, 50, 62, 75–6, 84, 92, 97, 144–5 five new Länder, 144 foreign occupation, 50–1 Grundgesetz (Basic Law), 75–6, 90, 137, 144, 169 immigration policy, 67 labour market reforms, 62 legislature (Bundestag, Bundesrat), 67, 144–5 parties, 29, 145 post-war economic and political developments, economic miracle, 147–8 reunification, 75–6, 97, 144–5 Weimar Republic, 29, 51, 104 West Germany, 51



Index 247

Index

globalization, 2–3, 7–8, 9–10, 20–1, 37–8, 45–7, 54–5, 72, 126–7, 140, 181–2, 194, 222 see also internationalization (political); transnationalization Gore, Al, 64, 66, 158–9, 161 see also United States governance, private, internationalized and global, 8, 10–11, 46, 109–10, 126, 187–8, 188–94, 200 government overload, (un)governability, 7, 73 Great Britain (United Kingdom, UK) and the EU, 66, 77, 98, 178–9 Asylum and Immigration Bill, 65–6 Bill of Rights, 149 Charter 88, 149 checks and balances, lack of, 115, 148 Conservatives, Conservative governments, 76–7, 148–50, 175–8 constitution, constitutional reforms, 62, 65–6, 96, 138–9, 148–50, 175–6, 177–8 devolution, 62, 96, 149–50, 175 elections, electoral system, 59, 62–3, 77, 96, 139, 148–50, 162, 175–6 elective dictatorship, 115, 148 Freedom of Information Act, 149–150, 175 Institute for Public Policy Research, 149 judiciary, Law Lords, 65–6, 139 Labour party, Labour governments, 62, 65–6, 76–7, 149–150, 175–6 legislature (House of Commons, House of Lords), 49, 90–2, 96, 149–50, 175 Liberal Democrats, 59, 149, 175–6 local, regional governments, 149 health policy and reform, National Health Service (NHS), 76–7, 97, 145, 178 monarchy, 83

‘nations’, Scotland and Wales, 96, 124, 148–9 New Statesman & Society, 149 Observer, 149 political culture, 90–1, 123–4 poll tax, 149 rule of law, 66 separatist, regional parties (Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru), 149 Westminister system, 47, 49, 76, 115 Great Depression, 200 Group of Eight (G8), 188–9, 226–7 Habermas, Jürgen, 135–7, 187, 222 hegemony, 34, 57, 222–3 Herfindahl-Hirschman index, 94 Hirschman, Albert O., 21, 26, 28, 163 history of ideas, 102, 108 hooliganism, 27 human rights, 8, 111, 115–9, 128, 133, 134–40, 142, 148, 151–3, 175–7, 192, 224 see also civil liberties; freedom identification, identities, 21, 90, 92, 126–7, 142, 219, 220 ideologies (criticism of), 107–8, 123, 221–2 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 190 inclusion, inclusiveness, 49, 131, 133 institutional reforms, 54–5, 63, 74–6, 96–7, 115, 162, 172, 176 interest groups, 83, 171–2, 181 internationalization (political), 7–8, 45–6, 50, 55, 70, 72, 121, 126, 127, 154, 178–9, 181, 187–8, 197, 200–1 see also globalization; transnationalization international (supranational) organizations, regimes, 8, 46, 50, 109, 110, 142, 154, 181, 188–94, 199, 222 International Relations (IR), 189 international treaties, 50, 178, 188, 191



248

Iraq wars, 71–2, 77, 98, 115, 127, 144, 146, 151–2 issue attention cycle, see Downs, Anthony judiciary, 38, 49, 51, 64, 66, 83, 96–7, 115, 137–8, 163 justice (distributive), 5, 16, 64, 104, 111, 126–7, 130, 150, 164, 197–8, 219 language, 31–2, 36 linguistic turn in the social sciences, 32 speech acts, 36, 223 see also discourses; political communication learning, 147–8 legality, 6, 49, 50, 104, 108, 115, 131–2, 135 legal positivism, legal theory, 104 legal sovereignty, 104 legitimacy attitudinal, behavioural, and communicative dimensions, 16–36 causes and effects, 17 empirical v. normative legitimacy, 2–5 ideological, structural and personal foundations of legitimacy, see Easton, David input v. output legitimacy, 8, 11, 102, 109–14, 183–4, 191–2, 201 origins and development of the term legitimacy, 5–8, 103–6 traditional, charismatic and legalrational sources of legitimacy, see Weber, Max legitimacy anchors, anchor institutions, 88–91, 92–3, 95, 96, 163–5, 169–70, 173–4, 179, 184, 192–3 legitimacy attention cycles, 44, 58–68, 70, 72, 78, 84, 158, 160, 185 see also Downs, Anthony legitimacy beliefs, 19–24, 36, 68, 106, 186, 221, 222, 227

legitimacy claims, 3, 6, 30–1, 36, 38–9 legitimacy crises, 10–12, 41, 49, 69, 79, 82–3 legitimacy deficits, 6, 8, 27, 68, 105, 109, 110, 193, 199 legitimacy levels, 16, 20–1, 23–4, 29, 47, 69, 70–2, 72–9, 85, 86–95, 164, 169, 183, 226–7 legitimation chain of, 105, 224 multilevel legitimation, 193–4 self-legitimation (of political elites), 30–1, 33–4, 39, 151 legitimation discourses, 31–44, 59–60, 62, 68, 69, 141, 151, 155–6, 160, 181–2, 183–5, 188, 195, 220, 221–2, 222–3 see also discourses legitimation grammar, 42, 43–4, 101, 155 legitimation intensity, 44, 55, 73, 75–6, 141–2, 145, 157–8, 190–1 legitimation objects, 4, 16, 42, 79–84, 95, 98–9, 108, 129–30, 159, 183, 188, 195 legitimation patterns, 16, 21, 42, 109–114, 159, 183–4, 191–2, 195, 197–8 legitimation strategies, see relegitimation, relegitimation strategies legitimation resources, 155–6, 168, 184 legitimation statements, 36, 42–4, 49, 54, 58–9, 223, 244, 227–8 legitimation styles, 93–5, 102, 116, 155–6, 181, 184, 192 legitimizers, delegitimizers, 34–5, 39 liberalism, 1–2, 6, 121, 128, 132, 134–7, 141, 148 see also neoliberalism Lipset, Seymour M., 147–8 majority principle, majority rule, 132–3, 220 Major, John, 149 see also Great Britain



Index 249

250 Index

nations, 148, 162, 176–7 natural law, 5, 107, 108 neoliberalism, 198 see also liberalism neo-Marxism, 8–9 new institutional economics, 195 new institutionalism, 48–9 NIMBY (‘not in my backyard’), 27 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 8, 191, 220 norms, 80, 100, 113, 131, 136, 153, 189

Norris, Pippa, 20–1, 69, 80–2, 108, 128 see also critical citizens nuclear energy and proliferation, 132–3, 220 obedience, 4, 22 parliaments, parliamentary sovereignty, 38, 46, 59, 66, 76, 80, 83–4, 104–6, 131, 148–50, 170–1, 175, 221 see also democracy, representative democracy; representation, representative government; sovereignty participation, 26–30, 130–1, 133, 136, 142–4, 168, 191 parties, party systems anti-system parties, 20, 26, 29 right-wing extremist parties, 29–30 patrimonial rule, 123 political attitudes, 18, 19–24, 34, 37, 185–6 political authority, 2, 5, 7–8, 25–6, 157–8, 187–8, 194, 222 political behaviour, 18, 25–31, 32, 202 behavioural dispositions, 24, 26, 34, 37 conventional v. non-conventional, 25–6, 28, 30 see also deviance, deviant behaviour; political violence; protest political claims-making, political claims analysis, 31–2, 42 political class, elites, 3, 6–7, 16, 23–4, 30–1, 34–6, 37–40, 46, 49, 65, 83–4, 92–3, 97, 107, 122, 132, 146, 147, 159, 170, 185–6, 197, 200 political communication, 41–2, 187 see also discourses; legitimation discourses political cultures, 21, 32, 35, 40, 50–1, 90–1, 93, 106, 109, 115–6, 123–4, 184, 223 political economy, 45–6 political efficacy, 23, 133, 186



markets, market economies, market regimes, see capitalism; free trade; financial markets mass media, 36, 39–41, 222–3 electronic v. print media, 40–1 journalists, journalistic styles, 39–41, 46–7, 185–6, 225 media bias, 59, 69, 185 media impact analyses, 185–6 media systems, 46–7 quality v. tabloid press, 40–1 Merelman, Richard M., 21, 24, 32, 42, 223 metaphors, 105, 204 methods case-study v. comparative v. large-N design, 44–5 Erklären v. Verstehen, 55 qualitative (interpretative) v. quantitative (statistical) methods, 55–7 reactive methods, 22 sampling, 30, 44–5, 51 selection bias, 55 see also public opinion research, surveys; text analysis Middle Ages, 5 military service, 26 moderation (temperance), 115–6, 124–5, 168, 224 monarchy, monarchical sovereignty, 83, 103–4 see also sovereignty morality, 4, 7, 31, 107, 126–7 multilateralism, 46 multilevel governance, 126 see also governance

political obligations, 5, 25, 127, 131 see also compliance political theory, 9, 103–4 political violence, 25–7, 190 politicization, 64, 103, 200 popular sovereignty, 6, 103–4, 105–6, 109, 111, 112–3, 115, 128–9, 131–2, 134–40, 143, 150, 151–2, 153–4, 165, 191, 197 see also sovereignty post-democracy, 11 post-national constellation, 7, 11 primogeniture, 5 privatization, 8, 10–11, 12, 13, 187–8, 195, 201 protest, 25–31, 42, 153 see also deviance, deviant behaviour; political behaviour; political violence psychology, 165 public opinion research, surveys, 4, 19–24, 185–7, 202, 220, 221 closed questions, 19 criticism of, 21–24 elite cues, 37, 40, 185 Eurobarometer, 1, 19 stimulus-response logic, 22, 186 World Values surveys, 19 see also political attitudes public spheres, 31–41, 140–1, 183, 186–7, 222 see also discourses; mass media; political communication ratchet effect, 68, 86 rationality, 22, 28–9, 81, 131, 220 reason, 104, 191 reform gridlock, 62, 97, 115, 142, 170–3 relegitimation, relegitimation strategies, 156–60 reliability, 203–18 religion, 5, 20, 103–4, 107–8, 111, 120–1, 165 representation, representative government, 49, 131, 144, 148–9 see also democracy, representative democracy

republicanism, republican government, 103, 109 responsiveness, 191, 197 reversibility, 132–3 revolutions, 6, 25, 103, 176 see also political violence; protest risk society, 136 rituals, 30–1, 34, 37, 59–60, 65, 78, 84, 90, 157–8, 184, 200, 221 Rome, 5 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 134–5 rule of law, 54–5, 66, 82, 104, 135–40, 146, 153 satisfaction, dissatisfaction, 20–1, 26, 28–9, 129, 145–6, 186, 219, 220 scandals, 65, 82–3, 147–8 see also corporations, corporate scandals; United States, Abu Ghraib torture scandal Scharpf, Fritz W., 110–11, 142–4 Schmidt, Vivien A., 48–9, 142 Schmitt, Carl, 135 Secretary General, see United Nations self-determination, 6, 134–5 sherpas, see Group of Eight single-actor v. multi-actor systems, 47–9, 93 see also veto players, points, positions social classes, 20, 111, 197–8, 200 social construction of reality, 32, 187 socialist regimes, 54, 135 see also authoritarian regimes; totalitarian regimes social movements, 25–7, 220 see also protest social networks, 37, 121 social policy, 55, 62, 76–7, 97–9, 125, 141–2, 144–6 health policy and reform, 76–7, 97, 145 old-age security, pension reform, 62, 71, 97, 161, 170 see also domestic policy; foreign policy sociology, 106, 196 sovereignty, 46, 50, 55, 82–3, 98, 104–6, 113, 126–7



Index 251

Index

stability, 17, 57, 80, 110, 115–6, 126–7, 140, 147–8, 159, 168, 176, 197, 227 state autonomy, state capacity, 7, 45, 55, 127, 194, 201 state intervention, 45, 55, 82 structuralism, 42, 160 sustainability, 198 Switzerland and the EU, 50, 77, 98, 151, 181 asylum and citizenship policy, 137–8 banking secrecy, 71 Bundesrat (federal government), 150 consociationalism, 173 direct democracy, referenda, 47, 50, 76, 82, 89–90, 95, 97, 98, 105–6, 150–1, 161–2, 169–73, 180–1 judiciary, Federal Court, 137–8 legislature (Bundesversammlung; Nationalrat, Ständerat), 150 neutrality, 142 old-age security, pension reform, 62, 71, 97, 170 political culture, 90 Swiss People’s Party, 137–8 tax reform, 89–90 Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de, 103 see also France Talmon, Jacob, 135 taxes, 26 text analysis, 12, 16, 19, 32, 35, 37, 41, 183 content analysis, 55–7 discourse analysis, 32, 55–7, 222 manifest v. latent content, 56, 206, 215, 227 text corpora, 50–5, 203–212 textual intention, see Eco, Umberto Thatcher, Margaret, 149, 175 see also Great Britain throughput, 110 totalitarian regimes, 51, 135 see also authoritarian regimes; socialist regimes tradition, traditional societies, 5, 32, 90–1, 105–6, 108, 123–4, 149–50, 162, 165

transnationalization, 38, 195, 222 see also globalization; internationalization (political) transparency, intransparency, 33, 37, 92, 109, 129, 143, 145, 159, 197, 200 trente glorieuses, 6 trust(worthiness), 1, 20–1, 106, 122, 140–1, 173, 185, 199–201, 219 Tsebelis, George, 142 see also veto players, points, positions Tversky, Amos and Daniel Kahneman, 165 United Nations (UN), 46, 78, 188, 190, 193 United States Abu Ghraib torture scandal, 62, 68, 168 and religion, 121 checks and balances, 115 Congress, 1, 46, 50, 78, 152 constitution, 90, 93, 95, 98, 105–6, 115, 138, 163–4 elections, electoral system, 64–5, 66, 76, 84, 96–7, 128–9, 158–9, 161 ethnic minorities, 163 foreign policy, 62, 71, 77–8, 91, 151–3 gay marriage, ballot initiatives on, 138 judiciary, Supreme Court, 64, 138, 163 parties, 64, 78, 125 President, 50, 78 State of the Union Addresses, 152–3 utility maximization, 29 see also rationality values, value orientations, 4–5, 19, 40, 80, 128, 222 veto players, points, positions, 47, 67, 115, 142–4 Vienna Congress, 103 Weber, Max, 5–6, 23, 25, 79, 102–3, 106–8



252

Index 253 World Trade Organization (WTO), 176–7, 188 zero-sum, positive-sum and negativesum legitimacy games, 179, 193–4, 199 Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-03

welfare state, 6–7, 45–6, 72, 91, 95, 97, 98–9, 145–6 Woolf, Lord Harry, 65–6 see also Great Britain World Bank, 190


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