Democratic Government as Procedural Legitimacy: How do Coordinative and Collaborative Arrangements Enhance Democratic Qualities of Government?

In addressing wicked problems raising from increasingly unpredictable social contests and crises, Western governments have adopted a wide range of coordinative and collaborative governance mechanisms and procedures, hence establishing new orders in which binding decisions are made. Seemingly unleashed from representative and administrative institutions, hybrid solutions, networks, partnerships, projects and platforms are expected to strengthen the capacities of core executives for agile, flexible and instant action. How are responsibilities redefined and practices redesigned when policy development and execution increasingly rests on coordinative and collaborative mechanisms such as partnerships, networks, projects, digitalisation and algorithmic governance? What are the consequences for the procedural legitimacy of government? These are the overarching research questions of the DemGo project. The more specific purpose is threefold: i) to provide a multiple level framework for analysing how changes in governance mechanisms and practices affect the democratic qualities of government; ii) to reveal potential contradictions between designated solutions for coordination, collaboration and digitalisation, based on inter-level analyses of how solutions are justified and of how they interact in practice; iii) to contribute to the development on new coordinative and collaborative solutions for government. Relying on extensive data sets and multiple methods, DemGo analyses the democratic qualities of solutions generated through administrative reform policies in Finland, covering a period from the 2008 financial crisis to the current Covid19 crisis. The design allows for comparative benchmarking of key findings.