Constructing Legitimacy: Policy actors, representative claims, and the use of citizen voice in policy development

It is argued that policy processes are legitimised when people judge them to be rightful, which can be assessed against conceptions of legality, justification and consent (Beetham, 1991; Parkinson, 2006). This study explores the role that policy actors play in democratic legitimacy, through an ongoing process of representative claim-making and reception. Rather than being conditional on a single action, legitimacy is provisional and must be reinforced over time through the sufficient acceptance of claims by an appropriate constituency (Eyal, 2019). This means policy formation can be seen as an event-based process where diverse policy actors – serving as makers of claims – continually construct and negotiate the object of representation (Saward, 2010). To build on this theory, I designed an interpretive qualitative study that uses two cases to analyse policy actors’ perceptions of the the use of citizen voice in drinking water policy development. These comparable crises caused severe illness amongst the communities affected, leading to investigations of existing regulatory governance frameworks of drinking water policy in the two countries. Taking the position that citizen voice is an integral element of the democratic legitimacy of public policy, this study explores policy actors’ representation of citizen voice, analysing how policy actors represent various claims of experts, indigenous and lay knowledge in public policy decision-making processes. I examine the tension between expertise-based claims – which rely on authoritative knowledge – and the need to meet the expectations of communities, I provide insights on the authority that policy actors place on citizen voice in decision-making processes. This paper offers a comparative and empirical contribution to our understanding of democratic legitimacy, representative claims and citizen voice.