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Legitimation Discourse before and after the Financial Crisis: Contours and Trajectories

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Capitalism and Its Legitimacy in Times of Crisis

Part of the book series: Transformations of the State ((TRST))

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Abstract

Chapter 3 by Henning Schmidtke and Steffen Schneider presents a content analysis of discourse on the legitimacy of the capitalist market economy in the Swiss, German, UK and US quality press. It draws on a ‘grammar’ of legitimation statements to demonstrate that the 2008 financial crisis triggered a legitimation crisis – a moment of uncertainty and politicization characterized by rising intensity and a more critical tone of media discourse. However, Schmidtke and Schneider also present evidence for the limited scope of the legitimation crisis: The legitimacy of the capitalist market economy hardly became an issue for business and political elites. Delegitimation focused on specific actors and institutions, not the regime as a whole, and there was no radical shift in the normative ideas that underpin it.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Our cut-off point between the pre- and post-crisis time windows is 1 January 2008, as indicated in Chapter 1.

  2. 2.

    A z-score represents the distance between the observed value of an indicator and the population mean in standard deviation units. The score is thus negative when the observed value is below the mean and positive when above. To calculate a z-score, the population mean is subtracted from the observed value of an indicator, and this difference is divided by the standard deviation. The population mean has a z score of 0, and the standard deviation of the z scores is 1.

  3. 3.

    For the measurement of economic growth, unemployment and state debt, we draw on OECD data. For debt, the OECD time series for Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States were supplemented with 2011 World Bank data, and for Switzerland with information provided by the Federal Financial Administration.

  4. 4.

    The labour movement – trade unions and their representatives – is not subsumed under the economic but rather under the civil society speaker type: Only the representatives of capital may be plausibly expected to have a prima facie legitimating bias.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bavarian School of Public Policy, TUM School of Governance, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Henning Schmidtke

  2. Research Centre on Inequality and Social Policy (SOCIUM), University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Steffen Schneider

Authors
  1. Henning Schmidtke
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  2. Steffen Schneider
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Correspondence to Henning Schmidtke .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Steffen Schneider

  2. Bavarian School of Public Policy, TUM School of Governance, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Henning Schmidtke

  3. SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Sebastian Haunss

  4. Centre for Global Cooperation Research (Käte-Hamburger-Kolleg), Duisburg, Germany

    Jennifer Gronau

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Schmidtke, H., Schneider, S. (2017). Legitimation Discourse before and after the Financial Crisis: Contours and Trajectories. In: Schneider, S., Schmidtke, H., Haunss, S., Gronau, J. (eds) Capitalism and Its Legitimacy in Times of Crisis. Transformations of the State. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53765-8_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53765-8_3

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-53764-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-53765-8

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