Local legitimation crisis and legitimation strategies

This paper addresses contestation and legitimation crisis at the level of local power. It studies the interconnection between the dynamics of the economic conjuncture of capitalism and local power legitimation. The theoretical perspective is based on Habermas’(1975) conception of the legitimacy crisis of governance within a capitalist system. To make sense of different complex dynamics, we will isolate the perspective for the local setting. How does the legitimation crisis expresses itself on the local level and how do local policy-makers deal with it? This is the central question I want to discuss in this paper. I argue that the strategies used by those policy-makers can be categorized on the basis of the two dimensions of legitimacy, the procedural and substantive, and on their exclusionary or inclusionary character