The limits of proceduralism: Critical remarks on the rise of ‘throughput legitimacy’
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12565 |
| Author | Jens Steffek |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
SYMPOSIUM ARTICLE
The limits of proceduralism: Critical remarks on
the rise of ‘throughput legitimacy’
Jens Steffek
Department of Political Science, Technical
University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany
Correspondence
Jens Steffek, Department of Political Science,
Technical University of Darmstadt,
Dolivostraße 15, 64293 Darmstadt, Germany.
Email: steffek@pg.tu-darmstadt.de
Funding information
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Grant/
Award Number: EXC 243.
‘Throughput legitimacy’is among the most successful conceptual
innovations that scholars of public policy and administration have
produced in recent years. I argue that this new understanding of
legitimacy needs to be seen in the context of an increasing proce-
duralism in political science and public administration. Throughput
legitimacy attracted so much attention because it is the perfect
normative companion to the analytical concept of governance.
Governance is procedure, and throughput legitimacy tells us what
good procedures are. In my critical discussion of this innovation I
examine the analytical value of the concept, as well as its normative
and practical implications. I argue that, regarding concept forma-
tion, throughput legitimacy may enrich existing typologies of legiti-
macy but at the same time has a severe problem of fuzzy borders.
Politically, throughput legitimacy lends itself to apologetic uses
when it is applied as a tailor-made normative standard for techno-
cratic, non-majoritarian institutions.
1|INTRODUCTION
The notion of ‘throughput legitimacy’is arguably one of the most successful new entries to the vocabulary of political sci-
ence and public administration. Following the seminal work of Michael Zürn and Vivien Schmidt it has become popular in
many fields of research, in particular in the study of local governance and European integration. Proponents of this con-
ceptual innovation argue that the typology of input and output legitimacy, originally introduced by Fritz Scharpf and
almost canonical by now, is incomplete. It needs to be complemented, they contend, with a third, procedural type of polit-
ical legitimacy that opens the ‘black box’between citizen input and regulatory output. Procedures of government, or so
the argument goes, can have independent legitimatory leverage that the other two types are unable to capture.
In this article, I argue that the steep rise of interest in throughput legitimacy must be seen in the context of
increasing proceduralism in thinking about government, constitutional law and public administration. Proceduralism
is a belief in the value of explicit, formalized procedures that need to be followed closely. Faced with the pluralism of
contemporary societies, proceduralists try to remain agnostic towards substantive political and moral values, such as
distributive justice. Throughput legitimacy, although intended to be an analytical concept, caters to such normative
proceduralism. It gives great prominence to procedural requirements and implies that compliance with them is the
Received: 10 October 2017 Revised: 31 August 2018 Accepted: 3 October 2018
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12565
784 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm Public Administration. 2019;97:784–796.
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