The state and problems of legitimacy
As mentioned above, the state may choose to delegate the delivery of policy, or sometimes both design and delivery, but it is the state which legitimates it. The private sector cannot legitimately claim to represent the public good; it is only under the auspices of state delegation that such a claim can be made.
Under this argument, it is the state that represents the people. Of course, many would argue that this claim is too simplistic. Legitimacy is a complex concept. The legitimacy of a monarch came from God. When this idea was increasingly criticized, theorists argued that legitimacy came from the people; that is the people are sovereign and they elect their representatives. The state has legitimacy because it is representative of the people.However, this conception of legitimacy might be seen to be problematic for two reasons. Firstly, there has been a significant decline in political participation in many countries. As fewer and fewer people are involved in the selection of their representatives, the legitimacy of the state and the government may increasingly be called into question. Some may argue that a lack of political participation indicates the politics of contentment; that it is not real disaffection with the government and the state that produces declining political participation, but rather satisfaction, and as such that there is no threat to the legitimacy of the state. However, as Piven and Cloward succinctly phrase it, ‘no one has satisfactorily explained why “the politics of happiness” is so consistently concentrated amongst the least well off’ (Piven and Cloward 1989: 13).
The second point is a separate, if related, one. In many states there is some debate about who is a citizen and so definitions of the ‘people’ are contested. Here, we return to the issue of identity and notions of national identity are far from unproblematic.
Increasingly, in most advanced states there are large numbers of residents, from foreign workers to illegal asylum seekers, who are not citizens. At the same time, there are even more people, first or second generation immigrants, who are citizens, but are regarded by many of the host population as failing to assimilate, or integrate. From the other perspective, many from ethnic, cultural and religious minorities often feel they are treated as ‘second class’ citizens and are not, in effect, represented by the state. Of course, the key point here is that modern states are now multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and have citizens drawn from various religious faiths, some very strongly held. Consequently, in contemporary states people have complex identities, reflected in the emergence of new terms which people use to self-identify; for example British Asian or British Muslim. Such complexities clearly make governance more difficult and, if such complexities are not addressed and resolved, then the legitimacy of the state may come into question. All this means that work on the state needs to pay particular attentions to the connection between the state and national, ethnic and religious identities.Of course, these arguments should not be pushed too far. In most advanced democratic states, more people vote than abstain. At the same time, whilst the multicultural nature of modern states places pressures on the state to recognize and reflect that diversity, few members of minority groups reject the authority of the state. As such, while there are pressures upon the state, it has no real rival. Indeed, supranational political bodies, such as the EU are blighted by far greater legitimacy problems than nation states (see Schmidt 2004; Majone 1998). Consequently, whilst the state may face legitimacy challenges, it is at present, and for the foreseeable future, the body most equipped to deal with them.
More on the topic The state and problems of legitimacy:
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- After having treated, in the first two chapters, the problems of mandatory norms — rules and principles — and of power-conferring rules, purely constitutive rules and definitions, we will now set out to examine permissive sentences.
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- Beyond the state?
- Green critiques of the state
- Defining the state