Democratic Legitimacy in Turbulent Times

Yesterday, June 24, I joined Federico Fabbrini and Kalypso Nicolaidis on a keynote panel in Florence at the European University Institute for the EU Horizon 2020 project REGROUP investigating the effects of Covid 19. My own contribution to the project was to theorize about questions of legitimacy during the pandemic. I wrote a research paper on the topic - Power and Legitimacy during Emergency Politics: A Democratic Audit of Responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic - and presented some of those findings and their current implications.

In my remarks, I discussed the issues related to legitimacy in terms of trust in governing authority and how this was underpinned by a tradeoff on governing activities--between political (input) legitimacy and procedural (throughput) legitimacy on the one hand, and performance (output) legitimacy. I also discussed how legitimacy was largely retained during the Covid pandemic (with good performance making up for less political participation and procedural accountability and transparency) where it had not been during the Eurozone crisis. I concluded arguing that if the European Union is to retain legitimacy in all three areas of governing activities, it has to successfully respond to the new geopolitical challenges facing it.