Autocracies need a certain level of legitimacy in order to survive without solely relying on repressive strategies (Bueno de Mesquita & Smith 2012; Gerschewski 2013). One strategy of legitimation is to exchange policies and resulting regulations for political support (Faust 2010; Olson 1993).
Within the process of policymaking, autocratic regimes can attempt to generate legitimacy through either input, throughput or output. We assume that the evaluation of the political regime and thus its legitimacy depend on three aspects of policymaking (Scharpf 1999; Schmidt 2013):
• The regime’s participatory capacity and responsivity to demands (input) (Lambach/Göbel 2010)
• The quality and inclusiveness of the governance-process as such and especially the integration of interests in the process of policy making (throughput) (Kropp/Schuhmann 2014)
• The authoritative allocation of values and the effectiveness of policy outcomes (output).
Following the distinction made above distinction, we argue that it becomes crucial for the autocratic regime to a) address demands of broader groups of the society without allowing for democratic participation; b) integrate the relevant interests in the policymaking process, and c) formulating effective policies that are congruent with the relevant social belief systems. In fact, the regime has to implement policies in a way that at least the winning coalition, but at best the selectorate, (Bueno de Mesquita 2003; Faust 2015), is “satisfied”. Thus, there seem to be three interrelated mechanisms that lead to legitimizing effects of policymaking 1) the factual, or objective, congruence of policies and belief systems of the policy coalition; 2) the way how a regime frames policies and relabels issues (Heinelt 2009) according to the shared beliefs of rulers and ruled; 3) the success or policy outcome.
Using the field of innovation, we will analyze the interrelation of legitimation and policies with respect to input, throughput, and output. Innovation is one of the most relevant drivers of economic growth, and it is a field where prestigious projects can be set up. As a distributive policy field, it also seems to be less conflictive than redistribute policy fields (Lowi). Even though some authors argue that innovation needs an open, democratic, and stable environment (Anderson & West 1998; Egea Nadal 1995) and thus is incompatible with autocratic rule (Göbel 2013), there is both, innovation policies and research on innovation policies, in autocratic regimes.
Some authors argue that innovation polices are highly relevant for output legitimation (Adler 1986; Leftwich; Easterly 2014). Others point at the potential for throughput legitimation when experts and other policy actors are integrated in the formulation of policies (Brooker 2009). On the other hand innovation polices can be highly risky, especially when they lose their distributive character due to necessity of redistributing material and immaterial values for large scale (infrastructural) projects.
We will use a mixed-methods approach to assess legitimation and innovation policies in a comparative perspective, focussing on 1) the input, throughput and output levels of legitimation strategies; and 2) the interrelation between content, output and framing of policies.
