The legitimacy of land use decisions by public authorities in the Netherlands: Results from a survey experiment

Abstract

Because of the ever-growing scarcity of land, decisions on land use are increasingly contested. Public authorities and policy makers rely on the legitimacy of their powers to make these decisions. This contribution empirically tests three legitimacy claims commonly used by public officials. We compare the political claim of representation of the public interest with the participative claim of co-decision and the judicial claim of neutrality and general legal norms applied equally to all. Our representative survey experiment (N = 1501) tests these claims in the context of land use decisions in the Netherlands. It appears that the participative and the judicial claim produce substantially more public legitimacy than the political claim of representing the public interest. Both co-decision and judicialization of decision-making can thus be effective ways to secure legitimacy of land use decisions.