Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

V. Schmidt · The Boundaries of “Bounded Generalizations” 337
In any of these responses to protest, democratic legitimacy is at risk. In
the first instance, where the government maintains its discourse and policy
without modification despite significant protest, the policy program remains
but its legitimacy is in doubt. This was certainly the case in the early
Thatcher years, before the discourse took hold. In the second instance,
where the government abandons the policy leaving the problems it was to
address unresolved and silence about what is to be done in the future, its legitimacy
is again in question while public disaffection grows. In France, this
was the case of Prime Minister Juppé’s public sector welfare reforms of
1995, where government’s initial persistence with reform in the face of
protest followed by its ultimate withdrawal of much of its initiative (even as
it persisted with some) in silence resulted in significant public disaffection,
and contributed to the government’s subsequent electoral defeat (Levy
2000). Finally, where the government modifies the program on a piecemeal
basis but continues to talk as if no change has occurred, the government’s
legitimacy along with that of the policy program is also in doubt. In France,
again, the traditional “statist” policymaking pattern in the industrial policy
arena, in which the government announced “heroic” policies formulated
with minimal consultation but as often as not accommodated the most concerned
interests in the implementation – thereby honoring the policy mainly
in the breach – also raised problems of government legitimacy while often
failing to solve the problems which the policy was to address (Schmidt
1996). 6
There are discursive solutions to these problems of democratic legitimacy
in single-actor systems, however. These entail increasing the legitimacy of
the authoritative voice in order to reduce the likelihood of an adversarial response
by strengthening the quality of ideas presented as well as the quantity
and quality of participation at both the coordinative and communicative
stages of discourse.
In terms of discursive ideas, for example, the authoritativeness of the discourse
is enhanced by improving the quality of the cognitive and normative
arguments. In single-actor France, for example, Juppé’s successor, Prime
Minister Lionel Jospin, reformed more with greater legitimacy and less confrontation
mainly because his discourse addressed how his policy program
6 Jean-Claude Thoenig (1985) makes the argument that this pattern of individualized exceptions
to the rules left state administrators, and not just the public, seeing such action as
illegitimate, which therefore made it impossible for them to build from those individual
solutions to craft better rules.