Legitimacy, Auditors and Advertising: The Auditor General of Ontario and the Government Advertising Act, 2004.

• In Event: Communication and Transparency in Government

Abstract

This paper examines the mandate of the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario to review all advertisements published by the Government of Ontario, disallowing advertisements that are partisan in nature. Using archival and oral history sources the paper applies Suchman’s (1995) theorization of legitimacy. It is argued that this expansion of the Office’s mandate was made in the absence of formal knowledge or audit procedures that might facilitate its execution. We show through analysis of interviews with the then Auditor General and the minister that it was acknowledged that the Office did not have such resources to draw on in this instance, thus ruling out procedural legitimacy as a support for the expansion of the Auditor’s mandate. We provide evidence that in effect it was cognitive legitimacy that facilitated the further development of the Auditor’s mandate. The paper reviews later government changes in the Auditor General’s mandate and resistance from the Auditor General to those changes. Finally the paper reviews the application of Suchman’s framework. This case is held out as a particularly significant example in research concerning the development of new bodies of practice, in that both practitioners and policy makers agreed that the absence of procedural legitimacy was not an obstacle to the expansion of an Auditor’s mandate. Instead cognitive legitimacy could be enough to bring such a mandate into being.

Authors

• Clinton Free, University of New South Wales

• Martin Emanuel Persson, Western (Univ. of Western Ontario)

• Vaughan S Radcliffe, Western (Univ. of Western Ontario)

• Mitchell Stein, Western (Univ. of Western Ontario)