Political legitimacy between democracy and effectiveness: trade-offs, interdependencies, and discursive constructions by the EU institutions

Sternberg, Claudia

doi:10.1017/s1755773914000356

Cited by 17 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 53 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Following Beetham (1991: 12-13), we may think of the legitimacy of relations of power in three interconnected ways, namely the legal validity of the exercise of power, the justifiability of the rules in relation to the beliefs and values shared by the dominant and subordinate in a society, and the evidence of consent on the part of subordinates derived from actions expressive of it. That is, when we assess the legitimacy of a particular approach to governance or to a specific set of policies, we are concerned not only with whether the actions taken under these systems are in accordance with relevant rules, but also how they are justified in terms of the beliefs, values and normative standards that people hold (Beetham 1991: 11;Sternberg 2015).…”

Section: Power and Legitimacy In The Eu Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The approach to EU legitimacy presented in this paper combines the normative and the empirical by building on a set of concepts that are normative in their criteria for legitimacy but serve at the same time as useful categories for empirical investigation (see also Beetham 2013;Sternberg 2015). Normative considerations naturally infuse empirical investigations, since the two are impossible to disentangle, in particular because empirical perceptions are generally influenced by normative principles and standards about what ideally to expect.…”

Section: Legitimacy In the Context Of The European Unionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Normative considerations naturally infuse empirical investigations, since the two are impossible to disentangle, in particular because empirical perceptions are generally influenced by normative principles and standards about what ideally to expect. We thus take seriously the Weberian insight that legitimacy is rooted in beliefs, and follow Sternberg (2015) in emphasizing how legitimacy also depends on actors' ability to justify in terms of "beliefs, narratives, and conceptual language shared by, and among, dominants and subordinates" (p. 617). In this view, claims to legitimacy are essentially contested "as political actors are trying to claim, maintain or challenge the legitimacy of regional institutions" (Rittberger and Schroeder 2016: 581).…”

Section: Legitimacy In the Context Of The European Unionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That is, good performance (output) does not guarantee legitimacy if citizens feel that the regime is not sufficiently responsive to their interests (McEvoy 2016). This interdependence between input and output legitimacy importantly puts the onus on actors to continuously (re)construct how their actions and policies speak to both input and output concerns (Sternberg 2015).…”

Section: Legitimacy As Input Output and Throughputmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For a very long time, however, this did not seem highly problematic, given the assumed trade-off between input and output legitimacy. Although discourses critical of output-focused notions of EU legitimacy have been voiced throughout the existence of the EU (Sternberg 2015), the dominant conception was long that so long as the EU delivered in terms of output legitimacy, input legitimacy was not at issue for citizens, at least as judged by their 'permissive consensus' (Lindberg and Sheingold 1970). But once a 'constraining consensus' developed in the 2000s (Hooghe and Marks 2009), it became increasingly clear that questions of input legitimacy could no longer be ignored.…”

Section: Input Legitimacy and Ideational Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Ideational power and pathways to legitimation in the euro crisis

Carstensen

Schmidt

2018

Review of International Political Economy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Ideational power and pathways to legitimation in the euro crisisThis work was made openly accessible by BU Faculty. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters.Abstract: How have European Union institutional actors sought to build, defend or undermine the legitimacy of crisis management during the euro crisis? Scholars have tended to investigate the euro crisis from either a pragmatic and prescriptive perspective -asking which reforms are necessary to build legitimacy in the governance structure of the Eurozone -or an analytical perspective focused on the power wielding of actors useful for understanding what actors have done and why they have been influential or not. The paper argues that rather than bifurcating the issues of legitimacy and power politics, much may be gained by investigating the relationship between legitimacy and power. Specifically, the paper employs the concept of ideational power to analyze the strategies through which actors have sought to defend their claims to three constitutive dimensions of legitimacy -input, output and throughput legitimacy -and proposes a matrix of nine pathways to legitimation that played into processes of legitimacy battles in the Eurozone crisis.

show abstract

Section: Power and Legitimacy In The Eu Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Legitimacy In the Context Of The European Unionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Legitimacy In the Context Of The European Unionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Legitimacy As Input Output and Throughputmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Input Legitimacy and Ideational Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Ideational power and pathways to legitimation in the euro crisis

Carstensen

Schmidt

2018

Review of International Political Economy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

The French and Dutch Block the Constitutional Treaty

Sternberg

2021

The Palgrave Handbook of European Referendums

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The 2004 Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe was meant to bring the European Union and its institutions 'closer to its citizens' (Laeken Declaration on the future of the European Union,15 December 2001), to give birth to a constitutive constitutional moment, European constitutional patriotism, and indeed a European people (see Sternberg 2013, Reh 2009. Ironically, it became the first treaty in the history of European integration to be stopped by popular resistance, expressed in two referendums. On 29 May 2005, 54.7 per cent of French voters rejected its ratification on a 69.7 per cent turnout, and three days later the Dutch followed suit, with 61.5 per cent voting No on an unexpectedly high turnout of 63.3 per cent. This chapter reviews what happened in France and the Netherlands at the time, and what scholarship knows about why people voted the way they did; the roles and dynamics of the referendum campaigns, and domestic and party politics. In doing so it raises the question of how we might know what people's electoral choices may actually have meant to them (see Sternberg 2015a). Of course, the No votes meant No to the draft treaty, but they 'also had multiple other meanings' (Berezin 2009:193). What considerations may the French and Dutch voters have brought to the exercise of choice on the day, what may they have wished to get across with their votes? This chapter brings together available causal explanations of the votes with some 'thick descriptions' of the narratives and discursive repertoires available to people at the time (see, for example, Berezin 2009, Glencross 2009, Sternberg 2015a. What follows is divided into three parts. First, the two referendums' political and discursive backgrounds are introduced. The second section turns to the campaigns, and the third discusses explanations of voting behaviour in these referendums. The conclusion closes on what they may be missing.

show abstract