New Public Management Reforms and Democratic Legitimacy: Notions of Democratic Legitimacy among West European Local Councillors

Abstract

Abstract The article extends the question about the notion of democracy to the concept of democratic legitimacy and distinguishes between input and output-based legitimacy. We explore local councillors' view on the two alternative notions of legitimacy. The first question is descriptive and concerns the support for alternative notions of democratic legitimacy among councillors across twelve West European countries. What notion of legitimacy receives the stronger support: input-based legitimacy, associated with representative democracy and participation, or output-based legitimacy, emphasising the performance of democratic institutions – as promoted by New Public Management reforms? The second question is explanatory and concerns whether the view held by the councillors depends on the multi-level government system in a specific country. We assume that the more responsibility for the production of welfare services held by local government, the more support output-oriented legitimacy measures is likely to receive. We find that our measures of input-based legitimacy receive more widespread support than the measures of output-based legitimacy. As regards the impact of local government systems and responsibilities held by local governments our main hypothesis does gain some support, but the results are not significant. A reasonable interpretation of the fairly weak findings at this point is that local government in all European countries has a strong political foundation. Despite system differences and NPM reforms, European councillors appear to be strongly attached to their traditional representative role. Key Words: New Public Managementdemocratic legitimacyinput and output-based legitimacyEuropean councillors Acknowledgements Vabo and Aars' contribution to the MAELG project has been funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Local and Regional Affairs and the Meltzer Foundation. Notes 1 The question was: "People have ideas about how local democracy should function. Please indicate how important for local democracy you feel the following requirements are." For each item the respondent was asked to state her/his opinion on a five point scale reaching from 0 (Not important at all) to 4 (Of outmost importance), where 2 denotes "Of moderate importance". 2 The question was: "How much do you agree or disagree with the following statements?" For each item the respondent is asked to state her/his opinion on a five point scale reaching from 0 (Strongly disagree) to 4 (Strongly agree), where 2 denotes "Neither agree nor disagree". 3 The ICC is calculated on the basis of the variance components. The total variance is computed by adding the variance for all levels (three levels in our case). Country-level ICC is calculated as the share of the total variance represented by this particular level. 4 P-values are 0.273 for the output-based index (table 3), and 0.470 for the input-based index (Table 4).