Procedure or performance? Assessing citizen’s attitudes toward legitimacy in Swedish and Norwegian local government

Abstract

A common understanding prevails that political systems generate legitimacy by both democratic procedures and performance in service production. With the increase of NPM models in local services, some scholars argue that performance is becoming a more important source of legitimacy than conventional legitimacy originating from the procedural side of governance. The aim of the article is to discuss and analyze the importance of and relation between these sources of legitimacy. The article examines three hypotheses: (1) the trade-off hypothesis, (2) the synergy hypothesis, and (3) the independence hypothesis. Based on citizen surveys in Norway and Sweden, our analysis argues that the dimensions are synergetic.

Keywords:

• local government
• legitimacy
• public opinion
• elderly care services
• building and planning services

Notes

1. Legitimacy has also been discussed from a system-level perspective, which is not discussed here.

Additional information

Funding

The research project reported in the article has been funded by Norwegian Research councils program DEMOSREG [grant number 209766].