Jennifer Dodge (

 Evaluating Claims of Justice: Credibility and Legitimacy in Environmental Policy Making.

This paper presents empirical findings from comparative, interpretive case studies of two grassroots environmental organizations in the United States. It documents the different kinds of policy claims that these organizations make based on their members' experiences of environment hazards. These claims are often articulated through justice discourses that attempt to call attention to the unjust distribution of environmental burdens in society. This article draws on empirical observations and theoretical arguments about legitimacy and credibility in deliberative democratic argumentation to develop a framework for evaluating arguments based on justice claims. It focuses on identifying distortions in communication that might be based on the use of emotions, rhetoric or performance/dramatization. A core goal of the paper is to begin to untangle when these communicative strategies are used to make arguments more compelling to apathetic or hostile audiences, and when they are used to distort interlocutors' understanding of "the facts" or coerce interlocutors to take action that they might otherwise not take. This paper will contribute to our understanding of deliberative democratic practice from the civil society side as civil society actors interact with governments and other actors.

Merlijn van Hulst (Tilburg University)

This paper starts from the idea that credibility can be established in big part through sense making.

It takes a few examples of credible and 'incredible' sense making in times of crisis to support this claim. It then focuses on two vital and interrelated aspects of (in)credible sense making: storytelling and performance. An important question is: When and how does one reach that magic moment when the audience no longer doubts and see story, performance and reality fuse? Although this never is a matter in which narrators and performers can have full control over their audiences, an interpretive approach to credibility can show how moments of magic did or did not come about.

Tamara Metze (Tilburg University)

Credibility in deliberations on cultural incentives for challenged neighborhoods.

This paper presents a theoretical discussion of deliberative governance and credibility and relates it to empirical work on cultural incentives and cultural planning for challenged neighborhoods. I will argue that deliberative governance theory promises that an increase of the deliberative quality of interactions between governmental and non-governmental actors, experts included, will lead to more credible and thus democratic decision making for the collective. More credible decisions will be the outcome, as it is in deliberations that participants enact the legitimacy and authority of other participants and their arguments. I will draw on an empirical example of a learning network on cultural planning to demonstrate how credibility is established in deliberations. Members of this learning network are governmental actors, housing corporations, artists, schools and citizens of challenged neighborhoods. They collaboratively investigate how and why cultural planning, and the stimulation of cultural activities in challenged neighborhoods is or is not successful to regenerate the neighborhood. In their collaborative inquiry participants consider some arguments and decisions more credible than others. This paper explores why.

Maartje van Lieshout (Wageningen University)

Constructing and undermining credibility through scale framing in complex decision making processes.

Co authors:

Art Dewulf, Assistant Professor, Public Administration and Policy group, Wageningen UR

Noelle Aarts, Associate Professor, Communication Science Group, Wageningen University

Professor Strategic Communication, University of Amsterdam

Katrien Termeer, Professor of Public Administration and Policy, Wageningen University

In this paper we analyze a complex decision-making process about the establishment of a so-called 'new mixed company' or 'mega-farm' in a small town in the Netherlands. We draw on interactional theories about frames and framing to analyze how key actors (politicians, entrepreneurs, an action group and citizens) use scale frames in different interactional settings. What is the role of scale frames in regaining/ maintaining credibility in conflictive or constructive interaction modes? (e.g. What is the role of scale frame mismatches?)

The framing of a problem is the result of interactions between different actors. Out of various frames people may construct in interaction we analyze scale frames, since these provide for many arguments both pro and against the establishment of the new mixed company. Different scale frames make it possible for both supporters and opponents to use the same facts to either confirm or reject the advantages and disadvantages of the new mixed company. And since it is possible to mix and match arguments on different scales and levels, scale frames provide for many possibilities to regain/ maintain credibility. Studying actors in different interactional settings shows us how they (attempt to) construct credibility taking their public/ conversation partners into account.

Scale frames are strategically used to construct credibility in different interactional settings. Actors take their conversation partners/ context into account and adjust their scale frames to construct credible arguments in that particular context, leaving certain aspects out and emphasizing others. However since scale frames provide many possibilities to construct credible arguments and since these scale frames are not specified, different actors continue to talk past each other and as such, in itself credible arguments, play a role in the continuation of the controversy.

Betsy Super (University of Edinburgh)

Constructing credibility on the doorstep: Thresholds, networks, and local political campaigners.

This paper addresses the way in which candidates for elected office rely on local campaign activists to build credibility with voters. While often referred to in an underdetermined role as 'ambassadors' for political elites, local campaign volunteers and paid staff who go door-to-door to solicit votes undertake a more complex set of practices to make elected officials credible for citizens. Local campaigners provide credibility for a candidate by building trust through discussions with voters, by providing personal endorsements for candidates, by acting as the physical representatives of those candidates, and - perhaps most importantly - by acting as boundary workers who bridge local community and elite political groups. Like Bang's everyday makers and expert citizens (Bang and Sorensen 2001, Bang 2005), these local campaigners act in a political context that is shaped primarily by and through networks rather than formal organizations. In short, one has to be a part of a specific social neighborhood or community, but also be a part of campaign.

The implications of this are (a) it signifies a qualitatively different role for local activists than what party politics scholars such as Scarrow (1996), Katz (1997) and Clark (2004) have theorized and (b) it re-imagines the organization of political parties as a series of overlapping networks. In terms of the discussion for this panel, the implications of this research are more helpful for understanding how easily credibility may be lost once candidates win office. If credibility is indeed constructed through door-to-door political campaigning but the work of local political activists in endorsing, communicating, and crossing community-elite networks only happens during election times, then elected representatives are vulnerable to declining credibility with their supporters once in office. Taking this view further, the problem is not the 'permanent campaign' that has taken over many political processes (Blumenthal 1980), but that the campaign - in its grassroots and local forms - is not permanent enough. Drawing primarily from fieldwork and in depth interviews from a 2006 gubernatorial election in the United States, this article also uses data on more recent events (including the start of re-election campaigns for the 2010 cycle) to elaborate on the implications of grassroots organizations and activists for the credibility of public representatives.

Tom Roberts (Lancaster University)

Walter Fisher's (1987) 'narrative rationality' emphasised the human mode of evaluating and attending to the significance of social stories.  His criteria of 'coherence' - whether or not a given narrative hangs together structurally - and 'fidelity' - how well a story resonates with its listeners - is an important reminder of the rhetorical power that narratives hold in everyday life and a useful insight within post-positivist policy analysis. We might augment Fisher's theory by the addition of a third criterion to narrative rationality, which can be thought of as the product of the interplay between coherence and resonance: namely narrative credibility. Looked at in this light, credibility is a relational attribute contingent upon the social standing of the rhetor or storyteller amongst their audience. Credibility is thus what is conferred upon the storyteller by the listeners through their successive endorsements of his/her account or oration. These insights are important in thinking about given the growing disconnect and bad faith between politics and society, expert and laymen respectively. The deliberative turn (Dryzek 2000, Fischer 2003) in policy analysis in many ways was recognition of the relationality of credibility as a two-way process between policy practitioners and publics, and the need to distribute credibility (and power) more equally. Scholars have long since argued the instrumental, normative and substantive advantages (Fiorino 1989; Laird 1993; Stirling 2005) of increasing public engagement in policy decision-making processes on trenchant socio-political issues (such as energy policy).  But what if citizens were to take an even more participatory role in working with decision making experts? How would this change the credibility dynamic? I argue that Jungkian Futures workshops (1987) offer huge promise in this respect providing the opportunity of a non-judgemental deliberative forum for storytelling, mass imagination and knowledge sharing. Storytelling and story-making in such an arena, can, I believe, go some way to establishing a common storied and thematic cultural language that transcends the expert non-expert divide and may even go some way to fostering mutual respect and credibility.

Steve Connelly (University of Sheffield)

Legitimacy through practice: how is 'new governance' made acceptable in democracies?

An important aspect of the development of and prognosis for new forms of governance is their legitimacy: for authority to be successfully devolved and diffused to new institutions and actors not previously engaged in policy- and decision-making it must, by definition, become legitimate.   Yet it is widely recognised that the traditional certainties of legitimacy conferred by the ballot box on decision makers, and by technical expertise on their advisers, (to a contested extent) break down in 'the new governance', raising the questions of how and why new forms of governance actually take root and become acceptable and accepted. 

To some extent this process becomes visible in explicit 'legitimacy discourse', through which actors explicitly set out, justify and often contest processes in terms which draw from political, and other, theoretical positions (e.g. norms of inclusivity, representativeness, effectiveness and so etc.)   Empirical research has also used interviews to engage practitioners in reconstructing similar arguments through reflections on their practice.   However, this approach plausibly leads to an over-theorisation, biasing analysis towards an understanding of legitimacy as arising from contests between defined theoretical positions. 

In contrast, this paper explores the possibilities opened by two other bodies of theoretical work.  On the one hand, theories of practice and practices suggest that legitimacy arises through the doing of governance (conceived as an interactive, skilled, and situated activity) rather than in arguments about legitimacy.  On the other, social and psychological theories have explored how innovative practices and their associated power relationships become legitimate in contexts such as management innovations within commercial organisations i.e. setting which are not 'political' in the classic sense of being engaged in the authoritative allocation of value in the public sphere.  

Illustrated by drawing on observations made by the author in various participant/observer roles and governance settings, this paper explores how these two perspectives allow an analysis of how new governance processes become legitimate, both through being practiced in legitimate ways and through shaping new norms of legitimacy.  However, it also seems important not to lose the normative evaluatory power of political theory - pre-eminently to enable us to make judgements about the democratic qualities of governance.  The paper thus concludes by suggesting how political and social theories of legitimacy can be reconciled in the analysis of governance practice.