Building Legitimacy Through Creating Public Value
The Problem
Sir Geoffrey Vickers book is “Freedom in a Rocking Boat”. Specifically, he is concerned about the relation of the governed and their governors in a democratic society. He suggests that the rate of change, enabled in part by our own thinking and institutional incentives, is pulling society apart from its ethical and communicative moorings such that there is not sufficient time or even awareness and will to have sufficient public reason and communication in the creation and adoption of new standards for public policy. Some have termed this “The Legitimacy Crisis”
Public policy is not self-regulating or mechanistic in the classical liberal view, but must be done more self-consciously by citizens and their representatives alike in a more densely textured interdependent post-liberal environment. Leadership has become decentralized, and new spaces for initiative, supported by technology, are evolving.
Professor Raghavan Iyer points to the citizen awakening which has shifted a world view concerning the relationship between people and institutions. He writes, “We need an adjustment on the part of each person in every given situation of the critical distance between the human agent and the limited structures, systems, and ideologies which he handles as instruments of his human purpose. This readjustment is the contemporary revolution.” P.70 Novus Ordo Seclorum. He then suggests that this is based on the assumption that individuals have unbounded capacities “to enrich their social environments through inspired self-chosen modes of cooperation with existing political structures.”
Thus Iyer points to the relationship and freedom needed between individual beneficence and initiative and the need for re-creating social institutions as a continual basis of enacting political and administrative legitimacy. This essay reviews how principles of legitimacy and prudent human judgment and initiative (phronesis) can create multi-dimensional public value and continually renew relations between citizens and their government.
Legitimacy and Institutions
Legitimacy is an open textured term usually employed to connote a source of political authority in policy. It can be seen as precondition for political cooperation and the accepted maintenance of order assuming the necessity of authority and laws. An instrumental view of legitimacy is one of effective degrees of coercion. Close to Hobbesian view, since you cannot directly coerce everyone to obey authority, you can enforce laws and thus economize. A democratic version might be that citizens can periodically vote to accept leaders within the rules of the game set down to handle competing value demands, giving up some of their freedom so that everyone might have a modicum of freedom within a stable social order with trust.
As Professor Iyer writes, “It is part of liberal and democratic doctrine that the method of persuasion is morally and even practically superior to that of pressure, that free discussion and rational argument are better than coercion or brute force. We commonly distinguish between force, which usually means physical constraint; influence, which implies the use of reason or of other skills; and authority, which presupposes the recognition by those who accept it of the moral and political legitimacy of its exercise by its holder.” Parapolitics p. 132. Attention to the degrees of non-coercion is essential to the respect we pay to persons, and the concern with justifying minimum coercion as a necessary evil to secure a larger good which itself a recognition of the superiority of nonviolence or ahimsa (non-harm) over himsa (harm).
However, the degree of coercion of governmental (or lack of governmental) policy is contestable in order to better regulate society through the public policymaking process. A non-instrumental view of legitimacy is that it consists of a principled contestation over power. It is here where one can look at conditions for legitimation and conditions which reduce it. This assumes that the fluidity of institutions, expressed through myriad programs and initiatives, can have their stock rise or it can decline depending upon public acceptance. This creates a more contingent, or situational theory of legitimacy.
Legitimacy in Bedrock Institutions
In stable democratic orders, citizens accord bedrock institutions legitimacy i.e. the right to perform according to societal standards. This allows government and other actors in the “governance system” to coordinate a complicated system if one is trusted by the ones that are supposed to be governed. Without legitimacy and its corresponding trust, it is difficult to achieve economical compliance with laws and the discretionary acts to carry them out. And it is very difficult to obtain the economic and political resources necessary for the state to implement policies in a competent way.
It is however the enduring symbols and ideals which form the basis of a bedrock legitimacy, not simply the institutions themselves. For example, Durkheim’s account of the transference of sanctity from religious to political and social acts; thus the giving deference to the office and its symbolism. Or general principles, not based on space and time, which are “self-evident” and inspire persons. Thus the notion of obligation, though attached to man-made laws, is prior to them, is grounded in the nature of man and natural law, and can be expressed in the symbolic myths and ideals of an empirical founding event.
This is why legitimacy as a term is more than simply situational trust. It is a fusion of a deeper, more enduring basis of obligation. It can also act like a “civil religion” in Robert Bellah’s term, as providing criteria for assessing particular regimes and particular acts relative to the more transcendent and sanctified symbols and ideals which support institutions. It is almost a measure of our identity though not our particular identities.
Even social networks involved in creating the “good” are unconsciously if not consciously smuggling in standards which have spoken or unspoken ideals behind them in the polity. Thus civil society itself is part of a larger set of principles which generate legitimacy, and while autonomous to varying degrees civil society organizations are still connected to the political system and contribute or diminish its sources of legitimacy.
The Role of the State in an Interdependent World
Traditionally the role of the State has been seen as the central, if not the sole actor, for the common good and central legitimizing agent for delivering public services and public obligations. The founding or starting event is an important act in establishing that legitimacy.
While there may be many strands and some major differences, the founding myth is important as a symbolic if not quasi-sacred act of defining a nation.
In the United States, for example, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were founding events. Generally, a majority of the Founding Fathers wanted to create a nation anew without monarchy or inherited customs and whose principles were based on reason and principles, not blind faith alone. In the Founding myth, society came first, and government was seen as limited if not a necessary aspect to contain evil. Thus, public value emerged when groups of citizens came together to create a public in a republican style of government (res publica: the public good) after or in response to society itself being engaged. Under the umbrella of abstract principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence as a statement of an intentional community, a new nation was born. However, Paine and Jefferson suggested that every generation should rewrite a constitution based on current needs of society for a dynamic republic.
Legitimacy in the Dynamic Public Arena
It is in this arena where the search or discovery of public value emerges. Both government and non-governmental actors strive to strengthen their communities occasionally appealing to the founding myths based on abstract principles. While government is viewed as the ultimate guarantor of well-being since it is the most legitimate and inclusive of citizenship rights, the public sector is viewed as having a major responsibility for providing direction in the community even though there is no one organization that has a monopoly of resources or intelligence about community well-being.
For one hundred years or so, we thought the best way to write constitutions and laws is through a priori reason and logic, implementing them through an executive branch termed “public administration”. While constitutions and laws present the overall political context and policy direction for public administration, we find that an increasingly complex, diverse, yet interdependent scale of activities—globally and locally—cannot be managed by a centralized democracy or bureaucracy. The demands are too complex, and there is too much space for skewing of policy objectives through as Paine wrote “jockeying for advantage.” The result is entrenched interest group gridlock and a moneyed democracy. The result is an alienated citizenry with segments less willing to engage diversity and calmly engage facts.
Thus, the late Robert Biller called for a shift from a public administration to an administration of publics. He suggested that when policy and administrative were expected to be both routine and acceptable, typical vertical, bureaucratic systems satisfied the tests of legitimacy: efficiency and effectiveness. But when the situation was brimming with uncertainty, based on a nonroutine or negotiated necessity, one can consciously create a process of discovery and fact-finding in order to enable surprises to emerge. Similar to scientific complexity theory, one could not compute all possible impacts and counter-impacts of a complex environment; thus it was better to begin with minimal specifications, and work with the dynamic, real time situation to steer the situation in a way which included legislative intent and certain requirements, coupling benefits and costs wherever possible, yet accounting for surprise. Judith Innes and David Booher discuss these dynamics further in their book Planning With Complexity. In other words, the public administrator’s role becomes a community facilitator in order to create public value. In order to do that, the public administrator must create a context for joint action where the task of assembling sufficient authority to act from those who share that authority would be an important managerial function.
Thus, in situations where routinized hierarchical approaches do not lend themselves to mobilizing public resources or support or simply must account for many unknowns, we create different ways of doing the public’s business. John Bennington suggests that public value can be achieved through ‘public space”: a democratic space which includes but is not coterminous with the state within which citizens address their collective concerns, and through which individual liberties have to be protected. Thus, Bennington argues that one needs to create the preconditions for the development of communal and shared responses to needs, promote the development of citizenship, the community, and the public sphere. He thus proposes community networked governance as an approach which can induce collaborative relations across sectors of society, public and private agencies, and citizens and community groups as appropriate in discovering joint action. See John Bennington and Mark H. Moore (ed.) chapter 2 in Public Value: Theory and Practice (Routledge).
This means different understandings of how public objectives can be achieved through “experimental governance”. Mark H. Moore summarizes this when we writes, “The meaning of authorization has changed in an important way. The authorization is no longer a narrow grant of resources to a well-defined agency assigned to deploy the resources to produce a particular result. Instead, it has become a broad social authorization—perhaps even an obligation—distributed across the citizenry to act on behalf of public purposes. Thus, there are a variety of horizontal approaches which have emerged which look to leverage resources to create public value for citizens and community.” P.118 Creating Public Value Harvard University Press 1995
Efficiency and effectiveness become important but not always overriding components of a larger social authorization which creates a dynamic, more trusting relation between the governed and their governors. This modality becomes a modern form of “barn-raising” or co-production of services where the concept of “public value” can become an inclusive form of eliciting the multi-dimensional values and trade-offs for public and merit goods while searching for ways to strengthen each and all i.e. a common good. In short, both governmental and non-governmental actors take part in creating public value within a context of greater social trust and “deep support”. Without creating a deeper relational social trust between the people and government, then one of the key factors and rationales of public value, generating legitimacy, is lost.
Leadership for Legitimacy
The cross-cutting public problems facing citizens, communities, and governments also require different patterns of leadership to create public value outcomes—leadership which can address:
- Interconnections between issues
- Negotiate coalitions between different stakeholders
- Orchestrate inter-organizational networks and partnerships
- Harness disparate resources behind a common purpose
- Achieve visible and measureable outcomes with and for citizens, communities, and stakeholders
- Can achieve at least minimal endorsement from elected officials
Jane Mansbridge suggests that effective public managers, in the end, are able to identify underlying common interests from stated positions, and creatively ally them to promote joint outcomes. As a public administrator, one must navigate the stream of legal and after-the-fact accountability on one hand with a sense of cultivating, with the community and/or its stakeholders, a common direction to allocate resources and capacities to promote the common good.
Leadership for Legitimacy for Public Value: Rebuilding the Motives of the Public Square
Professor Ramos in his New Science of Organization attempts to restore a truer philosophical understanding of organization theory. One of his Ramos’ distinctions is between behavior and action. Behavior denoted conformity to commands and manners dictated by external conveniences. Since men and women no longer live in communities where a substantive common sense determines the course of their actions, they do little more than respond to organized inducements. The individual has become a behaving creature, not a creator. The behavioral syndrome i.e. the obfuscation of the individual’s sense of standards generally proper to human conduct, has become a basic characteristic of industrial societies.
In contradistinction, action is proper to an agent who deliberates about things because he is conscious of their intrinsic ends. A person is a moral agent. By acknowledging such ends, action is an ethical mode of conduct. It is a deliberative act of reason. Thus, Ramos suggests that the public space becomes the potential for intrinsic, more autonomous community aims. Reason, or a capacity for open inquiry into human experience, engages the particular, local, and timely aspects of concrete experience and at the same time was a considered a capacity of person independent of the cultural environment in which one was socialized. This capacity of substantive reasoning presupposed a complex world of competing values and mankind’s ability to reason about values in concrete situations no less than to reason about facts or means to accomplish ends. Thus,. Ramos suggests that the public space becomes the potential for self-determination of community aims somewhat independent of financial inducements or hierarchical constraints or a priori meanings based on public policy.
It is the personal capacity of the leader, then, to engage a situation creativity (as a creator, not a behavioral creature). This is a skill in varying control to meet varying needs in changing situation. The statesman knows how much pressure to apply; he knows the potential pulse of the public at all times. What the statesman is entitled to demand, and what he can credibly elicit from citizens varies according to the temperature of the time.
However, the constraints oscillating between a coercive establishment and anti-establishment policies can be avoided by realizing the ever-present possibility of interstitial politics. This encompasses those pivotal points in political structures which reveal that the potential or free space in human encounters is always greater than the bounded, visible arenas of short-term politics. P.352 Raghavan Iyer, Parapolitics.
“Paradoxically, institutional limitations might suggest human possibilities when limits (in a Pythagorean or mathematical sense) are properly understood. Critical distance allows perception of vital points and hidden interstices through which may sense the undefined ontological plenty within which defined politics occurs. Great opportunities lie before statesmen and citizens at every turn, but they can only be seen and seized when there is calmness and clarity, nourished by a reasoned conviction of the supreme potential of all men to participate in a universal vision.” P. 352 ibid.
“This eventuality, as Plato knew, cannot be accommodated even by the best kind of discussion. It can only when an individual creates a life for himself where the internal dialogue is continuous, constructive and fruitful.”
The need for contemplation and an interior life is critical for moving beyond borrowed opinions and ideas and succumbing to the turmoil of the passions. It is through the constancy of such interior practice that one’s mind does not get overly swayed from the tyranny of the immediate and simply re-acting to existing actions. Rather, one can become open to the present moment, the here-and-now in real time, by suspending one’s assumptions. It thus calls for us to be open to the fine textures of a situation through being able to engage it while cultivating a critical distance from it. In this manner, one can think through ethical aspects of conflicting human values while being morally committed to pursuing truth, or a set of derived principles, in the situation. If one’s motives are to pursue the truth of the situation while having humility relative to the conceptions one brings to bear ahead of time, then one can more easily recognize people’s interests yet also create an ethical ordering of action.
This can derive from drawing out differences in a non-threatening environment as a group norm for evoking factors in the situation. Yet as Mary Parker Follett and others have stated, participative consensus is not an end in itself—it is the evocation of the creative imagination especially in the individual which is an integration of viewpoints on-the-ground (on a horizontal axis of discovery) which can derive from creative application of universal and ethical principles-in-action (derived from a vertical axis illuminating the mind). Thus, the art of policymaking is drawing out from others the common aspects of their multiple standpoints in the particular situation, while particularizing and instantiating the universal values in a dynamic situation so a more encompassing, approximate public good can emerge which can enhance legitimacy.
