When do Citizens Take Professional Authority as Binding and Legitimate?

• In Event: Legitimacy, Soft Power, and Authority

Abstract

Following traditional political science and sociological literature, professionals constitute an important nexus of authority, legitimacy and power, since they typically exercise power through persuasion and the exclusive command of specialized knowledge, as opposed to through formal coercion. This exact feature makes professionals crucial in the exercise and legitimation of state power, especially in the context of implementing complex policies within areas such as health, education, or planning (Wilson 1981). In other words, professionals play an important role in modern government, because their authority reaches beyond the state and democratic institutions, embedded as it is in what Paul Starr (1982) has called legitimate complexity. This is the implicit understanding that specialized expertise is required to understand and give advice on specific problems, and on a belief that a given professional group possesses this type of expertise.
However, we have little empirical knowledge about the constitution and exercise of professional authority. We conceptualize authority following the Weberian tradition as legitimate use of power, as well as the ancient Roman expression, that authority is "…more than advice and less than command, an advice which one may not safely ignore" (Mommsen cited in Arendt 2006). The analytical question then becomes what makes citizens follow such advice and take it as binding (Giddens 1991). Is it in fact the case, as assumed in the sociological litteraure, that professional authority is mainly based on specialized expertise, and that citizens tend to follow professional advice, because they think professionals ”know better” (Evetts 2011, Larson 2010)? Or could other sources be important, such as for example the social status of professional groups, or the personal relationship between citizens and professionals?
This paper addresses the gap in the literature by offering a new theoretical framework for the study of professional authority as well as an empirical study of sources of professional authority. We focus on factors making citizens accept, contest or ignore professional advice given to them, and explore if some citizen groups accept authority more easily than others. We do this using survey data from two representative samples of Danish and American citizens, applying, among other things, a unique survey experiment, where respondents are presented with specific professional advice, varying, however, on the level of professional expertise and the relationship between respondent and professional. Using the survey experiment as well as other items, we test whether specialized knowledge is indeed the most important source of legitimacy for professional authority, compared to other potential sources such as social status or personal trust. Also, we apply a range of individual level controls, including gender, social class, religious affiliation, political values, and previous interaction experience with professionals.

Author

• Gitte Sommer Harrits, University of Aarhus