Pathways to legitimacy

Abstract

Planners are centrally concerned with the legitimacy of planning institutions and practices. In a democratic society, governments depend on the voluntary compliance of external actors for the implementation of their policies. Planning theorists have largely focused on the inclusiveness and quality of deliberation in goal-setting. This article expands this focus using Scharpf’s and Schmidt’s distinction between three domains of legitimation—input, throughput, and output—each of which affords a distinct pathway to legitimacy. These legitimation processes are examined through a comparison of the postwar development of American regional planning institutions in Minneapolis–St Paul, Minnesota, and Portland, Oregon. The input-throughput-output distinction can be used to interpret the operation and impacts of historical planning activities, or prospectively to evaluate the potential impacts of institutional reforms.

Keywords

collaborative planning institutional design legitimacy new institutionalism planning history regional planning regionalism

In democratic societies, the implementation of public policies requires voluntary compliance—the “reflective acceptance of collective decisions by actors” (Dryzek, 2010: 143). The belief that the exercise of state authority is justifiable, even if one disagrees with specific decisions, is the essence of legitimacy (Gilley, 2006). Authorities that lack legitimacy must operate through the costly path of coercion and repression (Dogan, 2009: 196). Legitimacy is often characterized as a stock that can be expanded or diminished. As Tyler (2006) puts it, “legitimacy provides a ‘reservoir of support’ for institutions and authorities, something besides immediate self-interest,” thereby increasing the capacity to implement policies (p. 281).

Although not always explicitly addressed, legitimacy is of central concern to planners. Perhaps especially in the United States, but also in other countries, the legitimacy of urban development policies, including comprehensive plans, land-use regulation, and infrastructure projects, has been politically contested as they have come into conflict with private property rights, localized use-values, and self-interested governments. Indeed, the postwar history of local and regional planning is characterized by legitimacy crises. By the 1970s, the public challenged the legitimacy of closed, expert-driven, deterministic, and technocratic planning for being insufficiently inclusive and for generating undesirable outcomes (Baum, 1988; Fishman, 1980; Lash, 1976; Mohl, 2004). A new body of planning theory emerged in response, one premised on the necessity of more, and more thoroughgoing, democratic deliberation, the equalization of power relations, and the politicization of ostensibly apolitical technocratic planning processes (Arnstein, 1969; Davidoff, 1965; Fainstein, 2000: 453–461; Forester, 1989; Healey, 2012; Innes, 1995). In this context, planners are often concerned with securing the legitimacy of specific programs (e.g. a zoning bylaw or infrastructure project) and, more generally, the very notion of public-sector regulation of private action (e.g. land-use regulation). If planning in a democratic society must be legitimate to be influential, the processes by which legitimacy is produced and reproduced therefore deserve close examination. This necessitates a focus on the design of the authoritative formal institutions that structure planning processes, practices, and relationships among actors.

There is, however, considerable disagreement on where legitimacy comes from and what sustains it. Some argue that the state’s legitimacy is produced within the “input” domain; that is, from the democratic election of decision-makers and inclusiveness of goal-setting processes (Piattoni, 2010: ch. 10). Others suggest that it is derived from the quality of governance “outputs” (Rotberg, 2014; Rothstein and Teorell, 2008). In their analyses of the European Union (EU), Scharpf (1999) and Schmidt (2013) offer an influential, institution-centered synthesis that incorporates input and output legitimacy while also introducing throughput legitimacy: the openness, transparency, and fairness of governance processes. While this framework was initially developed to analyze policymaking and implementation in the EU, it has been applied to subnational and local governance (e.g. Haus, 2014; Heinelt et al., 2006) and can also be used to interpret local and regional planning.

This article proceeds in four sections. The first outlines Scharpf and Schmidt’s framework, discussing how its focus on formal institutions complements planning theorists’ discursive perspective on legitimacy and legitimation. The second section introduces the case of American postwar regional planning. The goal of regional planning is to coordinate and guide urban development at the metropolitan scale in achieve area-wide benefits, including, for example, greater cost efficiency, social equity, environmental quality, and food security. Regional planning requires allocating resources and growth opportunities across space (Perloff, 1968). In the typical American context of fragmented jurisdiction in metropolitan areas, the regional interest often clashes with the interests of some local governments. Thus, much as in the EU vis-à-vis national governments, American metropolitan planning agencies often compete rather than collaborate with local governments that claim greater legitimacy on the basis of direct election and the mobilization of local political identities.

The third section applies the Scharpf–Schmidt framework in a comparison of the postwar emergence and evolution of regional institutions in two American urban regions: Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis–St Paul, Minnesota. Metropolitan bodies in both regions have at various times been hailed as the most institutionally sophisticated in the American context (Abbott, 2000; Hitchings, 1998; Miller and Cox, 2014: 191). While sharing some common contextual attributes—an identical federal policy environment, relatively homogeneous populations, consistent population growth, emergent postindustrial economies, and fragmented local government—the structure and competences of their metropolitan institutions, as well as the character of their intergovernmental relations, differ in ways that are consequential to urban development. Indeed, Portland’s metropolitan planning regime has evolved to become more restrictive than in the Twin Cities, producing a demonstrably more compact urban form (see Ewing and Hamidi, 2014; Lopez, 2014; Orfield and Luce, 2009: 77–79). The two American regions may therefore be viewed as “crucial cases” (George and Bennett, 2005: ch. 6) of metropolitan governance and planning through which we can examine how formal institutions structure relations between actors in ways that facilitate or impede the legitimation of regional planning authority. The final section draws lessons from the comparison and concludes with a discussion of how the Scharpf–Schmidt framework could be productively applied in analyses of policymaking by local and regional planning institutions.

Institutions and the production and reproduction of legitimacy

Planning theorists have predominantly viewed legitimation as the discursive construction of norms, values, and identities that authorize planning practice. Alexander (2002), for example, probes the “public interest … as a legitimating principle and norm for practice” (p. 226). Healey (2007: ch. 6) portrays spatial strategy-making as, in the first instance, a discursive process of constructing frames that situate problems and solutions in spatial terms and mobilize the “distributed intelligence” of government and civil society actors toward place-shaping objectives. The “travelling capacity” of a spatial strategy—its ability to remain coherent as it moves through different governance arenas (185)—is understood to be a function of its legitimacy. Healey identifies a variety of legitimation processes, including electoral mandates, deference to expert knowledge, respect for citizens’ “situated knowledge,” and “the seductive power of the frame or vision to convince” (196–197). For Healey, then, the “institutionalization” of spatial strategies refers to their becoming embedded in norms and practices: “strategic discourses are at their most powerful where they become embedded in legal practices, in the routine conventions of relevant communities of practice, and where they are pushed along by tacit understandings” (196).

To be sure, discourses and norms play a crucial role in authorizing practices and programs (outside planning, see Campbell, 1998; Weir, 1992) and facilitating collective action (Benford and Snow, 2000). Still, focusing primarily on ideas and discursive construction downplays how formal institutions exercise legal authority, allocate resources, and structure relations among actors implicated in the urban development process. Some institutional designs may facilitate collective problem-solving and action, while others may not (Woo et al., 2015). For example, Legacy et al. (2014) find that community involvement and norm development were undermined by a highly prescriptive statutory planning framework.

Moreover, governance and planning scholars have become increasingly concerned with legitimacy gaps and “democratic deficits” as voluntary and collaborative forms of “thin” or weakly institutionalized network and multilevel governance have proliferated in the “soft spaces” that lie between traditional formal hierarchies and whose fuzzy boundaries reflect their complex relational geographies (Haughton et al., 2013; Stoker, 1998; Swyngedouw, 2005). In this vein, Levelt and Metze (2014) emphasize the importance of “credibility” in voluntary regional collaborations. As collaborative regional governance networks are typically less institutionalized compared with local and national governments, their performance depends on participating actors’ “belief in [their] effectiveness and trustworthiness” (p. 2372), a form of legitimacy that must be continually reproduced (see also Lau, 2014; Stern, 2008).

To specify how institutions may facilitate or impede the accumulation and reproduction of legitimacy, Scharpf (1999, 2003), and later Schmidt (2013) build on earlier systems theories (e.g. Easton, 1965) to develop an influential distinction between three domains of legitimation: input, output, and throughput (see Table 1). Their empirical focus is on the EU, an institution that has struggled for legitimacy in a crowded field of political actors. As a “government of governments,” the EU’s purpose is not to supplant member states, but to lower the transaction costs of achieving common objectives. Its complex institutional design need not be recapitulated here. As its policies are implemented by member governments, the EU rarely interacts with individuals directly. Important, however, is national publics’ perception of the EU’s “democratic deficit,” which is characterized as a legitimacy crisis (Longo and Murray, 2015; Schmidt, 2015; Schrag Sternberg, 2013; Schweiger, 2016). Duina and Lenz (2017) write that

the decision-making bodies and processes associated with the project of EU integration have been described as undermining parliamentary democracy in the member states, as being overly secretive and complicated and as significantly affecting the ability of national governments to pass public policies in the general interest. (p. 399)

Table 1.

The Scharpf–Schmidt legitimacy framework.

	Types of legitimacy
	Input legitimacy	Throughput legitimacy	Output legitimacy
Analytic focus	Quality of public participation in goal-setting (deliberation)	Quality of governance (processes and procedures of implementation design and execution)	Quality of outputs (performance)
Mechanism	Electoral process Inclusiveness of deliberation	Transparency, inclusiveness, accountability, openness in implementation of goals	Decision-making through problem-solving rather than bargaining Outputs generate durable support coalitions through positive policy feedback
European Union	“Government of governments” is not electorally accountable to the people (“policy without politics”) EU political identity is weaker than national identities	Closed and expert-driven process lacks transparency and openness	EU actions are viewed not as collective extensions of national sovereignty, but rather as encroachments on it. Self-interested national governments seek to maximize influence, leading to suboptimal outcomes (the “joint-decision trap”)
Regional planning institutions	Whether structured as “governments of governments” or state agencies, regional bodies are not electorally accountable to the people Regional identity is weaker than local government identities	Closed and expert-driven process lacks transparency and openness	Regional plans are viewed not as collective extensions of public preferences, but rather as encroachments on them Self-interested municipalities seek to maximize influence, leading to suboptimal outcomes (the “joint-decision trap”)
Remedies	Directly elect deliberative body (representation by population) Increase public involvement in goal-setting Constitutionalize existence and roles	Increase transparency (reporting and public education) Institutionalize integration of competitors into production of public goods Mobilize external defenders	Reinforce problem-solving orientation by replacing unanimity or supermajority rule with majority rule Permit differentiated involvement of members in institutions (opt-outs)

In Scharpf’s framework, input legitimacy flows from the governance system’s responsiveness to public preferences through public participation in the deliberative production of laws and rules. The EU is seen to have low input legitimacy because citizens do not directly participate in the legislative process. (While national citizens directly elect the European Parliament, that body has no power to initiate legislation and the executive is not responsible to it.) While in national politics policy choice is structured by partisan electoral conflict, EU policymaking occurs through competition among national and EU-level bureaucratic interests—a situation that Schmidt (2006: ch. 4) characterizes as “policy without politics.” Moreover, EU institutions lack a “constructive precondition” of regime support: a pan-European political identity that can compete with national identities.

Output legitimacy is concerned with positive policy performance, construed as the impacts that policies have on society. Government “derives legitimacy from its capacity to solve problems requiring collective solutions” (Scharpf, 1999: 11). Output legitimacy is complicated by multilevel governance, however. Scharpf proposes that the EU’s problem-solving capability is undermined by the incentives generated by its contingent relationship with constituent national governments. Self-interested national governments will surrender or delegate authority to a supranational institution when problems emerge that they cannot independently address. In doing so, however, they seek to maximize their influence over outcomes by insisting on supermajority approval or unanimity. The dominant mode of decision-making in this situation is bargaining rather than problem-solving, leading either to gridlock or suboptimal outcomes that undermine policy coherence and effectiveness, such as logrolling, side-payments, and ad hoc opt-outs and side-deals. The price of agreement is often de facto inaction, and distributive policies—those that would impose localized losses in pursuit of collective benefits—are virtually impossible to enact. Scharpf (1988, 2006); characterizes this as a joint-decision trap.

An important political manifestation of output legitimacy is what Pierson (1993) calls positive policy feedback—the generation of societal support coalitions that defend policies against challengers. Again, this is complicated by multilevel governance. Although many benefit from EU initiatives such as agricultural subsidies and the liberalized movement of goods and labor across national borders, its operation at a remove from the citizen means that perceptions of its initiatives are filtered through national politics and political identities. Citizens may resent EU initiatives as intrusions into national sovereignty even as they benefit from them.

While the input–output distinction has been influential, Schmidt (2013) identifies an important lacuna:

… [that which] goes on inside the “black box” of … governance, in the space between the political input and policy output, which has typically been left blank by political systems theorists. It focuses on the quality of the governance processes … as contributing to a different kind of normative legitimacy …. The point here is that the quality of the interaction among actors engaged in the …decision-making process—as opposed to the problem-solving abilities of their products or the participatory genesis of their preferences—is also a matter for normative theorizing. And how that interaction proceeds contributes toward, or against, their “throughput” legitimacy. (pp. 5–6)

In her perspective, throughput legitimacy accrues to the “quality of governance processes as established by their efficacy, accountability, transparency, inclusiveness, and openness” (6) as inputs are translated into outputs. The EU has often been criticized for its lack of transparency and external accountability, particularly in how bureaucratic experts interact with organized interests. “Throughput” echoes Sabatier and Mazmanian’s (1980) emphasis on agency staff’s sustained and open cultivation of support from politicians, stakeholders, and the public as a precondition for the achievement of statutory objectives.

This framework has informed proposals to enhance the EU’s legitimacy. In the input domain, it has been argued that directly electing the executive would democratize technocratic policymaking (Schmidt’s “policy without politics”), while throughput legitimacy could be increased through robust public education, transparent reporting requirements, and the systematic incorporation of interests into implementation processes. Finally, output legitimacy may be increased by creating supportive conditions for problem-solving as opposed to bargaining—for example, by replacing unanimity or supermajority rule with majority rule in routine matters.

Legitimacy and American regional planning

This Scharpf–Schmidt framework and associated concepts are useful analytic tools for investigating how planning institutions’ legitimacy deficit has constrained their ability to make and implement policies, and how their legitimacy may be increased. This is illustrated through comparison of postwar American regional planning institutions. Regional planning poses distinct legitimation dilemmas for two reasons. First, compared to local planning and development control, regional planning is concerned with multi-decade developmental trajectories over broad territories. Although regional planning goals are ultimately localized through their implementation at specific sites (and typically by other actors), their future effects are not readily understood by the public and, as such, they are unlikely to become focal points of resident interaction and mobilization. Moreover, the timing and precise location of regional planning impacts cannot be fully predicted by planners, politicians, and especially residents. In short, extragovernmental actors have difficulty connecting regional planning to their lived experience and proximate interests. As a result, increasing regional planning’s legitimacy through new modalities of public engagement has proven elusive (but see Fregonese and Gabbe, 2011).

The second reason is institutional. While national or subnational governments may undertake regional planning directly, in the American context the preference has been to create new metropolitan institutions. These, however, coexist with a dense ecology of authoritative entities—national and state governments, counties, municipalities, and special-purpose bodies—that draw on independent sources of legitimacy. In the Anglo-American context, local government derives legitimacy from a societal belief in local autonomy and democratic self-government, while sovereign national governments are legitimized by their constitutional monopoly on domestic authority and their role as the constituent units of the international system. Regional authorities—councils of governments, metropolitan planning organizations, joint planning districts, and so on—are at a systematic disadvantage compared with government entities that possess long-established legal or constitutional authority, deliver services directly to citizens, are the basis of political identities, and, as a result, command public loyalty. As Williams (1971: ch. 6) long ago noted, the regional standardization of “life-style policies” that directly and materially affect residents’ living spaces and life experiences, including land-use regulation, is strongly resisted by local communities, which entrench and defend their preferences using local government institutions. Independently incorporated communities have no incentive to voluntarily cede authority to metropolitan institutions; to do so would be “contrary to the laws of political biology” (Gulick, 1962: 125). In this context of inter-institutional competition, the legitimacy of regional institutions and the policies and plans they produce and implement are perennially contingent and contested.

Most American regional institutions are constructed as federations of local governments. This is analogous to the EU’s constitution as a federation of established nation-states. Both possess weak input legitimacy because they are not directly electorally responsible to the people. Public preferences are transmitted through indirect representation by local actors who “wear two hats,” often prioritizing the local over the broader interest. The basis of representation on deliberative bodies—equal per member unit versus proportional to population—has often been a flashpoint for conflict. Much as national identities overwhelm the pan-European identity, metropolitan identities are “thinner” than municipal, state, or national identities.

Metropolitan institutions also possess weak output legitimacy. Much like the EU, most metropolitan planning bodies do not deliver services directly to the public. Moreover, metropolitan planning’s long-term and diffuse nature means that the public cannot easily assign credit to regional institutions for outcomes. The two-tier structure of councils of governments, metropolitan planning organizations, and similar institutions also generates joint-decision traps. Decision-making often occurs through intermunicipal bargaining, not problem-solving. Self-interested local governments have little incentive to pursue distributive policies even if they generate aggregate benefits at the regional scale, such as an optimal spatial allocation of residential and employment growth or the efficient provision of trunk infrastructure.

Finally, regional institutions typically possess underdeveloped throughput mechanisms. The generation of technical information, such as population, employment, housing, land-use, and infrastructure demand forecasts and associated planning policies, is an expert-driven and technical process. To the extent that these are open to contestation by residents and organized interests—developers and builders, local governments, utilities, environmentalist and agricultural groups, and so on—debate often occurs in informal or closed-door settings.

Shifting from the abstract to the specific, the Scharpf–Schmidt framework will be used to interpret the postwar development of region-level governance and planning in two American metropolitan areas: Minneapolis–St Paul, Minnesota, and Portland, Oregon. Both regions entered the postwar period with large central cities, but the postwar suburban housing boom largely occurred beyond their boundaries. Suburban local governments were small and numerous and lacked the administrative capacity to regulate land use. State enabling legislation for comprehensive planning, zoning, and subdivision control remained underdeveloped in the early postwar boom decades. The result was scattered, low-density suburban development inadequately serviced by water, sewer, and transportation infrastructure. In response, local actors in both cities mobilized during the 1960s to institutionalize a capacity to plan and coordinate urban development and infrastructure extension at the regional scale. Both discussed or experimented with a variety of different metropolitan institutional formats during the postwar period: bodies that were advisory or authoritative; bodies that were constituted as municipal federations, directly elected councils, or state-appointed agencies; and bodies that were tasked with planning or coordinating other actors as opposed to providing services directly.

Despite these similarities, regional institutions have been credited with greater influence over urban development patterns in Portland than in the Twin Cities. This difference can be explained in relation to their distinct bases of legitimation. The case narratives, which draw on documentary, archival, and interview research, are necessarily abbreviated and partial rather than exhaustive. Attention is focused on episodes of institutional development and institutionalized processes that produce, reproduce, or undermine regional planning’s legitimacy.

Minneapolis–St Paul

There is a long history in the Twin Cities of regional special districts that operate infrastructure and facilities. A joint sanitation district was created in 1933, and an airports district in 1943. The first regional institution for the Twin Cities involved with planning and urban development was the Metropolitan Planning Commission (MPC). Section 701 of the 1954 National Housing Act required and partially underwrote the creation of regional advisory commissions to review for consistency applications by local governments for federal infrastructure grants. The Minnesota legislature responded to this mandate by establishing an MPC in 1957 (Sharifi, 1960: ch. 2). As specified in the statute, its members were appointed by local government councils, school boards, county boards, the boards of the sanitation and airports districts, and the governor (Twin Cities Metropolitan Planning Commission, 1958). The legislature exceeded the federal mandate in making local government membership in the Twin Cities MPC compulsory, granting it a small tax base, and empowering it to develop a “development guide” containing policies against which municipal applications for federal project funding would be assessed. As with other metropolitan commissions across the country, the MPC remained an advisory body with no authority to zone or regulate land subdivision, or to manage infrastructure systems. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the MPC produced an extensive array of reports on demographics; parks; industrial, commercial, and retail location; water and sewer infrastructure; transportation; and best practices in local planning.

In collaboration with the state highways department, county and city staff, and the University of Minnesota, the MPC leveraged federal grants to undertake a 10-year Joint Program for Land Use and Transportation Planning. In the Joint Program’s prospectus, the MPC emphasized that successful implementation of its policies would require the cultivation of stakeholder buy-in through outreach: “to develop understanding and acceptance of a plan for the Area through continuous involvement of those who will have the responsibility and authority for implementing the plan’s recommendation” (Twin Cities Metropolitan Planning Commission, 1963: 24). The MPC established three advisory committees: one of elected officials from each local government, another of more than 100 business leaders and other civic elites, and a third of technical experts. These met several times in 1965 to comment on the MPC’s emerging policy proposals (Twin Cities Metropolitan Planning Commission, 1966: 3–4). These throughput activities generated support for the regional planning program and for the creation of a more authoritative regional planning institution among local governments and civic organizations.

The 1965 national Housing and Urban Development Act mandated that MPCs be replaced by mid-1967 with “councils of governments” (COGs) empowered to coordinate local projects. Twin Cities elites wrestled with what kind of body should succeed the local MPC. All agreed that the new body must have expanded authority to maintain and implement the Joint Program’s development guide through review of local applications for federal funds in relation to metropolitan plans. Debates on the new entity’s structure focused on the appropriate constitution of its decision-making body—in essence, on the input domain. The notion that elected local governments could be overridden by an unelected regional authority was broadly viewed as illegitimate. The MPC argued that much as a city planning board reports to a city council, an elected metropolitan council could usefully serve as a focal point for community response to the Joint Program’s development guide (Twin Cities Metropolitan Planning Commission, 1964). Between 1964 and 1967, a bipartisan group of civic, business, media, and political elites called the Citizens League refined a coherent proposal: a directly elected, multipurpose Metropolitan Council with jurisdiction over seven counties. It would consolidate and regionalize existing special-purpose infrastructure and facilities management bodies. Coexisting with existing local governments, but lacking the authority to regulate land use, the new body would indirectly influence urban development patterns by using the development guide’s criteria to evaluate municipal applications for federal project grants and infrastructure system extensions (Citizens League, 1968; Einsweiler, 1968).

The proposal for an elected body that would plan and operate infrastructure systems—in effect, a new layer of local government independent of existing local governments—failed in the legislature. Viewing such a powerful entity as a threat to the state’s prerogatives, the legislature’s dominant rural faction enacted a more limited institution in 1967: a governor-appointed Metropolitan Council authorized to coordinate, rather than operate, infrastructure systems (Baldinger, 1971: ch. 7). Its input legitimacy would stem not from direct election, but from political accountability to the governor. It would influence urban development indirectly through review of the regional sewer and transit districts’ functional plans and capital projects. Proposals found to be inconsistent with the development guide could be indefinitely suspended. The limits of post hoc review quickly became apparent, however. The Council could not direct or initiate infrastructure proposals; it could only veto. Occurring only after the special districts had put considerable resources and effort into developing plans and projects, the political cost of exercising the veto was high and the ability to steer outcomes correspondingly small. In 1974–1976, the legislature acted to resolve growing intergovernmental conflict by formally subordinating the infrastructure districts to the Council and requiring local governments and counties to submit their comprehensive land-use and infrastructure plans for comment. These changes did little to increase the Council’s influence on physical development, however, because the political cost of vetoing district and municipal plans remained high. Seeking to avoid conflict, the Council’s development guide policies were sufficiently general that they accommodated the status quo.

As a de facto state agency, the Council’s input legitimacy derived from the political attention of state government (Harrigan, 1996: 222; Israel, 1996: 27–28). Gubernatorial and legislative support for the Council waned after 1978, however, as did public support for activist government. The influence of the bipartisan Citizens League faded as Minnesota’s politics became more party-polarized, depriving the Council of an external defender. State politicians increasingly viewed the Council as an adversary or patronage vehicle rather than as an instrument of state policy. Reflecting its weakness relative to local and state governments, the Council assumed a passive posture in reviews of regionally significant public and private megaprojects, including sports facilities and what was then the world’s largest shopping center (Harrigan, 1996: 218). Resentful municipalities delayed the Council’s review of municipal plans for consistency with the development guide until 1984, almost 10 years after its adoption. Developers mobilized against land-use regulation in the legislature and the courts and circumvented the Council’s urban servicing policy by assuming the cost of sewer infrastructure extension. Counties leveraged the superior input legitimacy afforded by direct election to erode the Council’s coordination of infrastructure systems, taking on new roles in rail transit and social services planning (Israel, 1996: 62, 73–74).

By the early 1990s, the Council’s ability to make and coordinate policy at the regional scale had withered in the absence of support from the governor, the legislature, and external interests, which in turn reinforced perceptions of impotence and illegitimacy. All agreed that change was needed. Leftwing legislators argued for direct election and stronger land-use controls (see Orfield, 1997: ch. 7). The state governor rejected direct election, demanding that the Council reform itself or be abolished. In response, the legislature reorganized the Council in 1994. The separate special-purpose bodies for transit, sewerage, and housing became operating departments of the Council. A direct election proposal failed by one vote. To reinforce political accountability, council members now serve at the pleasure of the governor rather than for fixed terms.

These changes within the input and output domains have not enhanced the Council’s capacity to make and implement regional plans, however. While some governors have treated the Council chair as a cabinet-level office and understood the Council to be an instrument of state policy, others have often viewed it as a political inconvenience. Its merger with infrastructure operators provided an opportunity to increase output legitimacy, as the Council become directly accountable for the quality of sewer and transit services. Although the Council has become a stable and trusted service provider, this legitimacy has not transferred to its regional planning function. Conflict continues as regional planning occurs through adversarial review of local governments’ plans and projects—a process they have every incentive to resist or subvert. Although the Council was established through the efforts of a bipartisan civic elite coalition, and council members and staff have sometimes built coalitions around projects (see Pinel, 2011), it has not nurtured an enduring external support coalition. Absent sufficient input, output, or throughput legitimacy to articulate regional goals independent of state and local actors, the Council has avoided conflict by minimizing the prescriptiveness of its planning policies.

In sum, the Twin Cities story is one in which successive regional planning institutions, each operating in a crowded field of competing self-interested state and local authorities, have lacked sufficient legitimacy to develop and implement market-shaping policies (see Table 2). Oft debated but never enacted, direct election offered one pathway toward greater legitimacy. Accountability to the governor or to local governments proved an inadequate substitute. Another potential pathway lay in expanded throughput mechanisms. Institutionalized involvement of local governments and business groups during the preparation of the original development guide generated support for MPC and the Joint Program. After its creation in 1967, however, the Metropolitan Council’s relationships with external actors have more often than not been strained, and it has done little to actively cultivate external support. Collaborative interaction with local governments, developers, and other organized stakeholders has not been formally institutionalized. As a result, external groups have never fully bought into the Council as either an independent authoritative actor or a convener of the region’s disparate public and private interests.

Table 2.

Institutions and legitimacy in Minneapolis–St Paul.

	Types of legitimacy
	Input legitimacy	Throughput legitimacy	Output legitimacy
MPC (1957–1967)	Low—commissioners selected by local government councils, county boards, school boards, the governor, and boards of the sewer and airport districts	Mid—constructive engagement with local governments and civic elites through the Joint Program	Mid—development guide produced by Joint Program welcomed by legislature, local governments, and Citizens League
Metropolitan Council (1967–1994)	Low—councilors appointed by governor; conflict over representation at inception	Mid → Low—increasingly adversarial relationship with state governments, local governments, development industry, and regional sewer, airports, and transit districts	Low—most decisions are made by other actors; Citizen League declines as an effective support coalition; Council’s reactive stance does not engender formation of new external support coalitions
Metropolitan Council (1994–present)	Low—councilors appointed by governor; conflict over representation when reconstituted	Low—relationship between the Council and local government remains adversarial; governor and legislature inconsistent in their support and engagement	Low → Mid—public support accrues to efficiency of transit and sewer systems now operated by the Council; regional planning remains reactive and permissive; no organized external support coalition

Finally, the Council’s planning outputs, principally the regional land-use pattern, have not engendered a durable societal support coalition because they have largely sustained market trends. While public support for the Council’s operating functions has grown since the 1994 reform that turned it into an operating body, its urban development policy interventions have largely been reactive and market-regarding.

Portland

Portland is often celebrated as a “capital of good planning” (Abbott, 2000), yet regional planning institutions and practices emerged only relatively late in the postwar period, and after several false starts. As in the Twin Cities, the first institution concerned with regional urban development was a federally mandated MPC. The City of Portland and its three neighboring counties formed an MPC in 1958. Invisible to the public and resisted by its four members and the many municipalities unrepresented on its board, the MPC’s small staff pursued a modest research and mapping program with limited political and financial support from its four members, which reauthorized its existence annually (Portland Metropolitan Study Commission, 1966: 18; Rich, 1967: ch. 9). The MPC neither sought nor received support from other stakeholders, including the local governments that were unrepresented on its board, nor did it engage the public. Ultimately, the MPC never became a legitimate player in the region and exerted no influence on the pattern of urban development.

In the early 1960s, civil society groups responded to uncoordinated urban development by advocating for the consolidation of the region’s hundreds of small service districts. This was expected to improve efficiency and accountability while creating a new capacity to plan suburban development (League of Women Voters, 1960). Responding to federal mandates, the legislature established a voluntary Columbia Region Association of Governments (CRAG) to take over the MPC’s project review function in 1967. CRAG was intended to address the MPC’s perceived illegitimacy by reconstituting its deliberative body to include all area local governments. However, CRAG’s attempt to develop a long-term land-use plan culminated in a joint-decision trap. Bargaining by self-interested local governments produced little more than a pasting-together of existing local plans rather than a mutually accepted framework for spatially allocating growth and infrastructure investment (Columbia Region Association of Governments, 1970). For example, the amount of industrial land designated exceeded any reasonable forecast of future need (Barron, 1973: 6). CRAG staff’s attempt to redesignate these to other uses was resisted by local governments, which feared losing out on their “fair” share of economic growth. As competitors for residential growth and business investment, they had little incentive to restrict urban development or make tradeoffs for the benefit of the whole. CRAG then took the path of least resistance by restoring the original designations and endorsing virtually all applications for federal project grants that it reviewed.

By 1973 CRAG was impotent. Public hearings revealed profound opposition to an unelected and seemingly unaccountable body infringing on local autonomy and individual property rights. Civic groups mobilized again, successfully lobbying the legislature in 1973 to make CRAG’s membership compulsory, weight voting by population, and require CRAG to prepare a “generalized, coordinated plan” to which local plans would have to conform (see Huston, 1977: 25–31). In parallel, the legislature also established the statewide land-use system, a set of policy principles that would be administered by CRAG in the Portland region (see Adler, 2012). Rural local governments continued to resist CRAG’s newly assertive planning agenda, however, which they saw as an infringement on their autonomy. As CRAG’s public profile remained low, it had few external defenders. It came close to being abolished by a hostile ballot initiative in 1976 (Abbott and Abbott, 1991: 17–19).

A parallel body, the Metropolitan Service District (MSD), met a similar fate. Created by the legislature in 1969 and ratified by tri-county voters in 1970, the MSD was intended to consolidate the region’s patchwork of water and sewer service districts, and also bus transit. Granted neither the power to levy taxes, nor the authority to unilaterally direct, coordinate, or absorb special districts, and strongly resisted by the City of Portland, the MSD failed to achieve its framers’ objectives. By 1976, it had assumed control only of the Washington Park Zoo and solid waste management planning (Abbott and Abbott, 1991: 15–16). While its management of the zoo was uncontroversial, a botched waste management procurement process undermined the confidence of the legislature, the public, and local governments in its ability to solve problems.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, then, the Portland story is one of multiple failed attempts to institutionalize a regional capacity to guide urban development at the regional scale. The MPC, CRAG, and the MSD each suffered from a legitimacy deficit. Each institution’s capacity to fully exercise its legal authority was constrained by a lack of political support from constituent local governments, which could draw on the superior input legitimacy afforded by direct election. Moreover, each made little or no effort to cultivate external support coalitions—throughput legitimacy—that might have enhanced its position in the face of local government resistance. The potential for output legitimacy was undermined by their inability to demonstrate concrete short-run successes to the public, itself the product of the regional bodies’ insulation from residents and, in CRAG’s case, its decision-making body’s bargaining rather than problem-solving dynamic.

It was in this context that local reformers mobilized to remedy what they perceived as the central problem: the absence of input legitimacy. They proposed merging CRAG into the Metropolitan Service District (MSD), which would become directly elected. To avoid rural opposition, the reformed MSD’s jurisdictional boundaries were reduced to closely align with the extent of urban development. The legislature referred this proposal to the electorate as Measure 6 in 1978. Its proponents’ campaign portrayed the merger as a means of expanding popular control through electoral accountability:

The case for Measure 6 is a case for democracy. Measure 6 is needed to provide the people, through the ballot box, the same control over area-wide governmental matters that they now have at every other level. (Citizens’ Committee for Efficiency in Local Government, 1978)

Narrowly approved, the directly elected Portland Metro came into being in 1979 with prima facie input legitimacy, yet public confidence was undermined by early failures in the output domain: the failure of a floodplain management plan, municipal opposition to a garbage incineration proposal, and an accounting scandal, all of which contributed to voters’ rejection of a regional property tax base in 1980 (Abbott and Abbott, 1991: 27). Metro’s weak position was revealed when it caved to local government pressure while completing delineation of the state-mandated urban growth boundary begun by CRAG. It also chose not to exercise its legal authority to produce “functional plans” binding on local governments, which strongly opposed the use of this power (Seltzer, 2008: 283–284).

From this inauspicious beginning, however, Portland Metro gradually accrued influence and support through increasingly sophisticated throughput activities. Leveraging the input legitimacy conferred by direct election, it diligently pursued a multipronged program of staff engagement with municipalities, advocacy groups, and the public. An urban–rural support coalition took shape. Downtown business leaders saw Metro’s administration of the state-mandated (but Metro-defined) urban growth boundary as a means of reversing downtown decline, while urban property developers came to appreciate the investment certainty provided by coordinated planning. Exurban farmers who were instinctively suspicious of land-use regulation also saw benefit in rural land protection. Metro’s development in collaboration with municipalities of a central open data clearinghouse, the Regional Land Information System, not only settled intermunicipal disagreements over facts and facilitated cross-jurisdictional collaboration, it also built trust in Metro as an honest broker (Seltzer, 2008: 284–285). Metro also emerged as a convener of local governments for long-term transportation planning, bringing municipal, county, and state officials, as well as TriMet (the regional transit agency), into routinized interaction. Perhaps most importantly, the influential environmentalist group 1000 Friends of Oregon—many of whose staff had worked for Metro and the state planning commission—became an active funder of supportive independent policy research and a vigorous defender of regional planning in the legislature and the courts. Portland Metro’s carefully nurtured external support coalition protected it from challenges from the increasingly polarized state legislature and citizen-initiated challenges at the ballot box. Growing public trust in Metro was evidenced by voter approval of Metro-led bond issues to construct new convention and visitor facilities, and to acquire land for new parks and open spaces.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Portland Metro leveraged its support coalition and emerging intergovernmental convener role to engage in more robust regional planning. Recognizing that unilateral exercise of its legal authority was politically untenable, Metro adopted a throughput-oriented legitimation strategy. It established committees of elected municipal officials and state agency representatives to develop regional planning strategies while simultaneously engaging the public through public meetings, focus groups, walking tours, and a media campaign. Regional planning also gained widespread public attention through the advocacy of external proxies, especially 1000 Friends.

The Metro 2040 Growth Concept was adopted in 1995, and its implementation has continued despite ongoing threats, because local elected officials were drawn into close interaction with Metro, and because Metro cultivated outside support from the public and organized interests (Abbott, 1997: 31; Fregonese and Gabbe, 2011: 235–236). This consensual and participatory system became formalized when voters approved an institutional innovation in a 1992 referendum: a home-rule charter for Metro (Cotugno and Seltzer, 2011: 289; Metro Charter Committee, 1992). Whereas previously Metro was viewed (by the public, if not by state government) as a state agency responsible to the legislature, popular approval of the charter cemented its image as a novel form of local government that represented an independent regional expression of the popular will, counterpoised to other elected local bodies. Portland Metro has drawn on its legitimacy to successfully oppose urban development schemes supported by municipalities and to broker a long-term growth “grand bargain” in 2015 that defines where, and where not, to grow (Christensen, 2015). Such is Metro’s legitimacy relative to other entities that has taken over a campaign from TriMet, the regional transit agency, to promote approval of a large bond issue for transportation infrastructure expansion (Redden, 2017).

In summary, the Portland and Twin Cities narratives resembled one another in the early postwar period. Federal mandates induced the creation of advisory metropolitan planning commissions in the late 1950s and their later transformation into authoritative bodies. In both places, civic elite coalitions generated policy ideas and lobbied the state legislature for their adoption. If anything, the potential for a strong regional planning function was greater in the Twin Cities, where the constitution of the MPC’s deliberative body was more inclusive and both the MPC and the Metropolitan Council enjoyed stronger legislative support in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ultimately, however, the Portland narrative illustrates how institutional design choices facilitated the accumulation of legitimacy (see Table 3).

Table 3.

Institutions and legitimacy in Portland.

	Types of legitimacy
	Input legitimacy	Throughput legitimacy	Output legitimacy
MPC (1958–1967)	Low—counties and City of Portland; excluded other local governments	Low—no engagement with local governments or organized interests	Low—minimal outputs fail to generate a durable external support coalition
CRAG (1967–1979)	Low—counties and incorporated local governments; conflict over representation	Low—adversarial relationship with local governments	Low—decision-making through intermunicipal bargaining produces a permissive land-use scheme in 1971; conflict-aversion produces permissive urban growth boundary in 1976
MSD (1969–1979)	Low—counties and City of Portland; resisted by City	Low—state and local governments opt not to expand and empower	Low—failed waste management procurement undermined confidence
Metro (1979–present)	High—direct election establishes independent source of legitimacy	High—actively incorporated governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders into decision-making and implementation processes; became clearinghouse of trusted information	High—planning principles and outcomes generate a durable support coalition for planning (e.g. 1000 Friends), which enables more directive land-use policies; successful stewardship of visitor facilities and regional park bond issues creates positive public visibility

In the input domain, the adoption of direct election when the MSD and CRAG were consolidated to form Metro was perhaps a necessary but insufficient precondition of regional planning’s legitimation given Oregon’s tradition of direct democracy and electing even minor officials (see Clucas et al., 2005). Election also established direct accountability to citizens as public faith in experts and technocratic rationality faded in the 1970s and 1980s. Still, enhanced input legitimacy did not enable Portland Metro to dominate established local government actors. Rather, Metro gradually expanded its influence over urban development by institutionalizing robust throughput mechanisms: large-scale public outreach programs, the cultivation of an external support coalition of organized interests and advocacy groups, the transparent sharing and reporting of information, and the systematic engagement of local governments, not as subordinates or superiors, but as peers—relationships institutionalized in the 1992 home-rule charter. Following early operational missteps, Metro’s influence also grew as it demonstrated administrative competence and produced popular outputs, including the regulation of the urban growth boundary, the operation of the convention centre and other facilities, and the creation of regional parks and open spaces. While in the 1970s and 1980s CRAG and then Metro (like the Metropolitan Council) shied away from intergovernmental conflict by adopting permissive policies or by applying policies permissively, Metro leveraged the input legitimacy conferred by direct election by expanding, and ultimately institutionalizing, constructive engagement with competing actors and support coalitions. The outcome: a legitimate capacity to make and implement policies that impose selective losses in pursuit of regional benefits, and Metro’s further accumulation of output legitimacy as its policies are manifested in the regional urban development pattern.

Pathways to legitimacy

Using the Scharpf–Schmidt framework to compare the postwar historical development of well-documented regional planning institutions in two American metropolitan areas suggests that each domain affords a distinct pathway to legitimation and that some institutional designs may facilitate the production and reproduction of legitimacy more than others.

The input domain

Although the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council possesses greater statutory authority than Portland Metro, it has been less willing to use it. This reflects the Council’s weak position in the region’s field of governance. Imposing losses on external actors—for example, by allocating urban development to one local government jurisdiction over another—in pursuit of aggregate regional benefits has proven politically insupportable because an unelected body is viewed as less legitimate than elected local governments. The result is a tacit policy of forbearance, whereby the Council avoids adopting and implementing policy directions that conflict with market trends. While constituted as a council of governments rather than as a government-appointed state agency, CRAG faced a similar dilemma in 1970s Portland. The local governments that made up its general assembly were unwilling to exchange proximate self-interest for long-term benefits, resulting in CRAG’s articulation of permissive policies that accommodated the status quo. CRAG’s conversion into the directly elected Portland Metro gave it the input legitimacy to incrementally establish new relationships and acquire new responsibilities.

The throughput domain

Greater input legitimacy was not enough, however, to enable Portland Metro to impose directive policies on external actors. This became possible through the cultivation of throughput legitimacy. Metro became a trusted collector and disseminator of high-quality regional data. Councilors and staff also strategically mobilized supportive advocacy groups. Metro’s 1992 home-rule charter institutionalized collaborative engagement with local governments. This aspect of the charter did not make Metro an agent of local governments. Rather, Metro maintained an autonomous point of view by virtue of direct election—policy with politics, in Schmidt’s terms—and its exercise of exclusive mandates established in state legislation and its home-rule charter. The result is an institutionalized process in which Metro’s elected council leads goal-setting while implementation strategies are defined in partnership with local governments, and both occur under the watchful eye of an active external support coalition. By contrast, the Metropolitan Council’s relations with external actors essential to implementing regional planning—counties, local governments, and interest groups—have been more adversarial than collaborative. It is possible that the unelected Council could have expanded its influence through concerted legitimacy-enhancing throughput strategies that institutionalized local government collaboration in designing policy implementation, or which cultivated third-party defenders.

The output domain

Output legitimacy can only accrue when an institution generates identifiable outputs that generate positive policy feedback: public support and organized support coalitions. This occurred in Portland but not in Minneapolis–St Paul, where land-use policies have largely accommodated market trends. In Portland, earlier successes begat later influence. Through positive experience, local governments, the public, and interest groups conferred legitimacy on Metro, its planning authority, and its policies, complying voluntarily with directive policies that would likely have faced resistance had they been adopted at an earlier stage.

This interpretation of the Portland–Twin Cities comparison should not be taken as a recommendation that all American metropolitan organizations should become directly elected, nor should it be taken as confirmation that input legitimacy trumps all. Rather, this application of the Scharpf–Schmidt framework demonstrates, first, the utility of distinguishing between alternative pathways to enhancing the legitimacy, and therefore the effectiveness, of planning, and, second, of focusing on how the design of planning institutions facilitates or impedes legitimation. While multiple pathways to legitimacy are available, not all are equally so. Portland Metro used the input legitimacy afforded by direct election to craft regional policy goals; however, its ability to implement them is a function of throughput legitimacy accumulated through institutionalized interaction with external actors, and also output legitimacy accumulated through positive policy feedback. Portland Metro may exemplify a best-case scenario—one in which the exercise of legal authority was legitimized by processes in all three domains. CRAG and the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council exemplify how the exercise of legal authority is constrained by a legitimacy deficit, and how the different domains are interdependent. In the input domain, the unelected Metropolitan Council lacked the legitimacy to set regional planning goals that impinged on the self-interest of local governments, while CRAG’s model of decision-making by local government delegates generated a joint-decision trap. In both cases, the throughput domain offered another pathway to production and reproduction of legitimacy, yet neither body pursued this path. Moreover, neither CRAG nor the Metropolitan Council could accumulate output legitimacy because neither could set goals that deviated from market trends or imposed localized losses to achieve regional benefits.

To conclude, voluntary compliance with collective decisions is the essence of the state’s legitimacy. Legitimacy is a stock that, once built up, can later be drawn down. The legitimacy of formal institutions matters because they exercise authority, allocate resources, and establish incentives to conflict or collaboration among actors. Without legitimacy, public institutions and those who work within them lack the durable capacity to craft and implement policies that materially influence social, economic, and environmental outcomes. How formal institutions are designed may facilitate or impede legitimacy formation. Drawing on a framework initially developed by Scharpf and extended by Schmidt to analyze the EU’s legitimacy crises, this article identifies three domains in which legitimacy is produced, reproduced, or diminished: input, throughput, and output.

Theorists of communicative planning and consensus building (Healey, 1997; Innes, 2004; Legacy, 2012) have focused much attention on the inclusiveness and quality of deliberation in goal-setting; that is, on the input domain. Extending a growing institutionalist perspective in planning theory (Sorensen, 2018; Taylor, 2013; Verma, 2007), this article suggests that planning theorists can productively complement this focus with explicit attention to dynamics in the throughput and output domains; that is, how institutionalized interaction with external actors may bring recalcitrant actors on side, and how the impacts of planning policies may generate external support coalitions. While postwar American regional planning agencies provide a useful introduction to these concepts due to their institutional similarities to the EU, the input-throughput-output distinction can be applied to any planning agency. As in this article, planning historians may use it to interpret past processes of institutional development and behavior. Alternatively, the framework may be applied prospectively as a heuristic to guide institutional design choices. Indeed, parsing reform options is Scharpf’s and Schmidt’s objective in their analyses of the EU. As the legitimacy of planning and planning agencies enables the crafting of spatial strategies that seek to change urban development patterns and sustains voluntary compliance with them, the input-throughput-output distinction permits interpretation of why some formal planning institutions have formulated and delivered on such strategies while others have not.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Zack Taylor

Author biography

Zack Taylor is assistant professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He is a non-practicing Registered Professional Planner (Ontario, Canada).

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