A Comparative Approach to Local Government Legitimacy

This paper aims at exploring local government legitimacy in a comparative perspective. It understands the legitimacy of local government as a function of its relationship with both central government and the own citizens. The first part of the paper is an elaboration of the theoretical implications of this assumption mainly by considering how it is related to other relevant theorizing. The relationship with central government is discussed in the light of theories of central-local government relations and local government autonomy. This include the distinction made by Page and Goldsmith (1987) between functions, discretion and access and a new measure of local government autonomy developed by Ladner, Keuffer and Baldersheim (2015). This measure emphasizes different types of capacities in the hand of local government and in particular components of self-rule and shared rule (cp Hooghe et al 2010). In a corresponding way, theories dealing with the relationship between the municipalities and their citizens are discussed. In particular, the implications of identifying different types of legitimacy is considered. Perhaps the most relevant is the distinction between input-, throughput and output legitimacy suggested by Heinelt and Haus (2005), referring to Scharpf (1999). In the second part, the alternatives identified in the theoretical section are applied to a European setting by empirically investigating how they can be used as a basis for operationalizing local government legitimacy. The main question is to what extent different theoretical alternatives provide different outcomes with regard to how local government systems in different countries are classified. Do the same countries end up in the same positions, independently of how local government legitimacy is measured?