Editorial to the Issue on Legitimization of Private and Public Regulation: Past and Present

Abstract

This thematic issue brings together research from political science and legal history about legitimacy discourses covering different forms of public-private co-regulation and private self-regulation, domestic and transnational, past and present. These forms of governance highlight the important role of non-state actors in exercising public authority. There has been a growing debate about the legitimacy of non-state actors setting and enforcing norms and providing public goods and services. However, the focus of this thematic issue is not on developing abstract criteria of legitimacy. Rather, the authors analyze legitimacy discourses around different cases of privatized or partly privatized forms of governance from the early 20 th century until today. Legitimacy is subject to empirical and not normative analysis. Legitimacy discourses are analyzed in order to shed light on the legitimacy conceptions that actors hold, what they consider as legitimate institutions, and based on what criteria. The particular focus of this thematic issue is to examine whether the significance of democratic legitimacy is decreasing as the importance of regulation exercised by private actors is increasing.

Accessing the Neighbourhood: Built Environment Performance for People with Disability

“…105 Political direction, societal norms and entrenched ways of working inform governance structures, which are then reflected in regulatory methodologies. 106 In Australia, in built environment longevity terms, built environment accessibility legislation is relatively recent. Historically, various state-based building regulations generally contained some provision for 'disabled access'.…”

Public administration, public leadership and the construction of public value in the age of the algorithm and ‘big data’

“…Power relationships between governments and private actors are unbalanced in the ‘depleted state’ (Lodge ), and private actors have the financial resources to recruit available talent with rewards packages that dwarf those on offer from government or academia. Technology entrepreneurs, and the companies they control, are able to shape not only knowledge about but also discourse around the technology, using their ‘control of technical language’ (Marvin ) ‘discursively to frame their services and technologies’ (Gillespie ), as an example of their perceived ‘thought leadership’ (Drezner ) and ‘epistemic authority’ (Coni‐Zimmer et al ). In this context, the word ‘algorithm’ is used to suggest objective decisions shorn of human biases: Facebook's Trending Topics were ‘surfaced by an algorithm’, the company said in 2016 after it was accused of anti‐conservative bias (Osofsky ).…”