Understandings of legitimacy: legitimation policy in grand government statements in the 19th legislative period. A comparative analysis

Abstract

The contribution reconstructs understandings of legitimacy of political actors as they are discursively articulated in the grand government statement and the parliamentary debate in the 19th legislative period and analyses them with respect to the post-democratic content of legitimation arguments. By taking up the debate on post-democracy—one of the most prominent and most recent harbingers of a democratic crisis—the article scrutinizes post-democracy empirically with regard to a change of ideas, understood as legitimatory core norms. Drawing on discourse network analysis techniques and by comparing the results to previous government statements since 1949, the study elicits the degree to which the publicly communicated understandings of legitimacy are in line with or in opposition to long-term developments. The article shows how legitimation arguments interact and that the dominant patterns of justification deal with democratic core norms rather peripherally and neglect the input dimension of legitimacy. This perpetuates a persistent trend in the political discourse of legitimation, which is furthermore characterized by a scarcity of shared legitimatory core norms but at the same time by the absence of open conflicts about the legitimatory content of legitimation arguments. Compared to previous debates, change occurs with respect to some legitimation arguments. In particular, the usage of arguments foregrounding aspects of economisation and freedom as well as a conflict about the legitimatory role of ‘nationalism’ interrupt persisting continuities.