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H2020Individual fellowship2015–2017

MLGPIL · POLICY INNOVATION AND LEGITIMACY IN REGIONAL MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE

Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2015-09-07 → 2017-09-06
EU contribution
€183,455
Participants
1
Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST

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Results in brief

POLICY INNOVATION AND LEGITIMACY IN REGIONAL MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE

Legitimation of political processes has become increasingly complex and multi-faceted in recent years. Increasingly, political decisions stretch across levels of government - local, regional, national and supra-national - and include a wider range of both governmental and non-governmental actors. Governance processes have in turn become increasingly complex and potentially removed from traditional ideas of political decision-making and debate. This creates a potential political problem if governance processes become mismatched with conceptions of political legitimacy. The project addressed this problem by developing an understanding of how multi-level governance and legitimation correlate, and what the effects of this connection are on political decision-making. This framework explores governance as structural, relational or policy processes, each of which have a different effect on legitimating political decisions. By better understanding and analysing the connection between governance processes and political legitimation, the project had three main objectives: 1. Develop the conception of multi-level governance as a theory by creating an explanatory framework for how governance affects legitimacy; 2. Understand how governmental decisions are legitimated and seen as legitimate, and how this aligns with actor perceptions of legitimacy and governance; and 3. Examine how conceptions of legitimacy travel both between governmental levels and between actors. Multi-level governance was unpacked into relational, structural and policy processes, which were linked, respectively, to ideas of political legitimacy based on inputs (participation in shaping governance and political decisions), throughputs (the procedures underlying governance and decision-making) and outputs (the results of governance and decision-making). This framework was then applied to different EU contexts to both determine the efficacy of the framework and to answer the research questions outlined above.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

Multi-level policy-making between EU, national and sub-national levels has become increasingly complex. This has created the need for innovative governance solutions to address this complexity, which in turn has had an effect on political legitimacy. This project aims to address this topic by developing the linkages between procedural innovation in governance and the legitimacy of these processes in a multi-level political context, looking at how (or whether) political legitimacy can travel between governmental levels. The main research questions that will be addressed are:1. In what ways does procedural innovation affect legitimacy in the multi-level context of the EU?2. How do EU governance tools affect perceptions of legitimacy at Member State and regional levels?The project will look at the effects of the EU-level Social Open Method of Coordination on Member State policies in the UK and Ireland, and what this means in terms of legitimacy at all political levels. A combination of literature review, discourse analysis, network analysis, interviews and statistical approaches will be used to assess legitimacy as citizen input, policy output and procedural throughput. It is hypothesised that EU innovation does act to improve throughput and input legitimacy at the EU levels, but fails to increase this legitimacy at national levels. However, output legitimacy in Member States is likely to increase due to EU oversight.The work is highly relevant and innovative. It looks to disentangle serious questions faced by the EU in this age of Euroscepticism regarding legitimacy and democracy, showing how EU decisions are made, whether these decisions are seen to be legitimate and how this filters down to the national level. This research will help to disentangle the role of different governmental levels in both creating and receiving legitimacy derived from new governance approaches using innovative methodological and theoretical approaches.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

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Data: CORDIS, © European Union