The conclusion synthesizes the book’s empirical findings across city council, mayoral, and school board elections and revisits CITIE’s core claim that independent expenditures are conditional political instruments. It identifies patterns that generalize across cities and explains how outside groups adapt their strategies to institutional design, media strength, and local coalition structure. The chapter then returns to the democratic stakes, including policy responsiveness, public trust, and legitimacy, and it draws together a reform agenda focused on disclosure, coordination rules, public financing, and improved access to local information. It closes by outlining what a more resilient urban democracy would require as outside money continues to shift into municipal arenas.

At a diet in Mainz in January 1103 the German emperor Henry IV (r. 1056–1105) announced his intention to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. His public proclamation was accompanied by a celebratory mass during which the bishop of Würzburg delivered a sermon emphasising the penitential nature of Henry’s journey. The temporal proximity to the First Crusade and the public ceremonial nature of the episode suggest the bishop aimed to situate Henry’s pilgrimage in the orbit of the nascent crusading movement. A few months later Henry wrote a letter to his godfather, Abbot Hugh of Cluny, revealing a main objective in undertaking the trip. Henry planned to visit the places where Christ had lived, and he hoped this act of public penance would help reach a permanent settlement with the papacy over the Investiture Contest. Though scholars have been aware for some time of the resounding impact of the First Crusade on nearly all facets of medieval society, it is worth underscoring the significance of the German emperor – no great supporter of the reforming popes – floating the idea of associating himself with an inherently papal-centric institution as a means of achieving his political agenda.

Football-related disorder remains a visible form of collective violence, generating substantial policing costs and persistent tensions around rights, legitimacy, and public order. Despite declines in organized “hooliganism,” football continues to be governed through highly resourced public order policing grounded in static assumptions about fan groups. We argue such approaches misdiagnose the problem. Drawing on Social Identity Theory and the Elaborated Social Identity Model, football disorder is conceptualized as an interactional and relational process shaped by legitimacy, identity, and institutional practice. Methodologically, the chapter advances an outward-facing, epistemologically pluralistic psychology integrating ethnography, interpretive analysis, and Participatory Action Research. Empirically, it compares developments in football policing in England and Wales with contemporary approaches in Switzerland. The UK case illustrates how dialogue-led, research-informed practice can foster legitimacy, self-regulation, and de-escalation, while the Swiss case shows how preemptive, legalistic controls undermine legitimacy, amplify oppositional identities, and escalate conflict.

Chapter 2 introduces the concept of Accountable Design and provides a detailed exploration of the terms accountable and design. It draws on extensive scholarship from human–computer interaction (HCI), design research, technology law, and science and technology studies. It advocates for a human-centred framing of accountability and explores the various challenges of achieving more accountable Clever Computing systems. It advances three broad framings of design within Accountable Design, namely, design as a critical lens to help speculate and reflect on futures we want to build; design as an instrumental lens to engineering solutions to problems; and design as creative practice and methods. Normative concerns around design as a regulatory tool are presented, such as the legitimacy of designers’ role alongside the speed and the nature of the enforcement of rules through design. Analysis focuses on how to reconcile legal and design perspectives by exploring how to account for legal values in human-centred technology design processes.

Three concepts associated with ‘good governance’, referring to the quality of governance processes and outcomes, are examined in this chapter: accountability, legitimacy and trust. For each concept, definitions are reviewed and characteristics identified. The chapter investigates accountability through key themes of complexity and challenges associated with delivering on downward accountability in the context of decentralisation. Complexity arises from the number and range of actors involved in co-management, situated at different administrative levels, with multiple demands on and mechanisms for accountability. Different forms of legitimacy and trust are introduced and reviewed, including input, output and throughput legitimacy and dispositional, rational, affinitive and procedural forms of trust. Challenges to delivering and maintaining legitimacy and trust in the context of co-management and solutions to these are identified.

The Introduction outlines the central question of the book: how should we interpret the TRIPS Agreement when addressing the legitimacy crisis of international intellectual property (IP) rights? The COVID-19 pandemic and current trade tensions highlight both structural and cyclical tensions of the global knowledge economy. In this context of instability, the introduction sets the stage by considering the TRIPS as the structuring agreement for international IP protection. The chapter introduces this republican conception of non-domination as the core normative framework and previews how this concept will be applied across the book’s chapters. The chapter sets out the interdisciplinary methodology, bridging legal analysis and political theory, and clarifies the intended contribution: a reframing of the TRIPS that takes its legal character seriously and evaluates its moral legitimacy as part of international law.

The introduction explains why the boundary between business decisions and social decisions has eroded. Corporate operations now shape speech, safety, health, and democratic life as a direct result of scale, efficiency, and automation.

The introduction explains why familiar responses fail. Shareholder primacy breaks down when investors disagree about corporate purpose. Stakeholder approaches identify affected groups but offer no way to resolve conflict. Calls for neutrality ignore the reality that operational choices already function as social policy.

The introduction presents the book's core claim. Corporations have built governance systems to manage social conflict because no other institution can respond quickly enough. These systems are not symbolic commitments. They are operational structures that allow firms to set standards, justify decisions, and revise practices over time.

It introduces corporate ordering and previews the tripartite framework that organizes the book. It explains the role of the case studies and situates the project within debates about corporate power, regulation, and democratic legitimacy.

This chapter focuses on small-state defiance to show the limits of big-power influence. It compares the manners of and degrees to which Malaysia and Vietnam choose to defy China while still deferring and partnering with their giant neighbor in the development, diplomatic, and defense domains. In brief, Vietnam has demonstrated a greater readiness than Malaysia to defy China not just on security and sovereignty issues (most notably in the South China Sea disputes) but also economic and connectivity matters (primarily 5G wireless, and to some extent the BRI projects as well). Besides, Hanoi has also displayed a tendency to defy Beijing in a more direct, open, and costly manner than Malaysia. The authors argue that different combinations of legitimation pathways lead these two countries’ elites to selectively display varying degrees and patterns of defiance behavior toward a powerful neighbor, even while they continue to show deference to and collaborate with it.

The United Nations and its bodies have ‘opened up’ to a broad range of non-state actors over the last three decades, including for-profit actors and their representatives. The shift is reflected in the UN’s sustainable development goals and the Global Compact, emphasizing public-private partnerships; in greater participation of corporations at treaty conferences; in trade group roles as observers at organizations; and in multi-stakeholder projects. Yet international organizations have generally not developed robust responses to legitimacy concerns about businesses becoming closely involved in lawmaking and governance projects. These concerns focus on interest group capture, entrenchment of western economic elites, creeping privatization, and erasure of public deliberation. Indeed, the participation of for-profit actors and their representatives has largely been a ‘silent revolution’: under-heralded and under-examined. This chapter argues that responses to for-profit roles in the work of international organizations tend to express one of two logics, not yet reconciled. The logic of ‘representation’ values public authority, interest representation, transparency, and accountability. The logic of ‘expedience’ values pragmatic problem-solving, efficiency, knowledge, and progress. Each has different priorities and blind spots, encompasses an array of theoretical approaches, and would push the international system in a different direction.

Historically, democratic progress has been widely understood as correlated to the representative quality of institutions. Representativeness has been seen as essential for the social appropriation of institutions in societies analyzed as having a class structure. In the national political order, parties were intended to represent the different social interests, and in the particular context of labour, the recognition of trade unions played this role. It is in this spirit that the International Labour Organization (ILO) included trade unions in its various bodies when it was created a century ago, and, since then, the ILO has served as a reference point for representation at the international level.While this conception of representativeness remains relevant, the scope of its application has become more limited. A growing number of essential issues, such as the conservation of the environment or the protection of privacy, are, in fact, directly political: they structure our common world. In this context, authority and legitimacy carry weight in the public debate. Representativeness, by which we can ‘measure’ the social weight of a speaker, is only secondary. ‘Public voices’ have come to have greater relevance, due to their ability to resonate with, and thereby focus and shape, public opinion. These ‘public voices’ are expressed by expert groups with specific subject-area knowledge, or by individuals who have benefited from the haphazard nature of media coverage. As a result, their integration into international life can no longer be institutionalized in the ‘old fashioned’ way.

This concluding chapter synthesizes the book’s central arguments and findings, emphasizing the dynamic and politically consequential relationship between the Supreme Court and public opinion. It revisits the 2022 Dobbs decision as a quintessential example of an unpopular ruling that triggered sustained public backlash, a sharp decline in the Court’s institutional standing, and significant partisan polarization. The chapter summarizes how the book’s novel survey-based methodology measures the ideological gap between Court rulings and public preferences, revealing significant term-to-term fluctuations. Key takeaways include the finding that the Court’s rightward shift after 2020 was driven by compositional changes, but also that the Court has levers, particularly docket selection, to strategically realign itself with the public without sacrificing its ideological goals. The analysis underscores that the public reacts more to salient rulings than to compositional changes, and that ideological disagreement drives down approval, erodes legitimacy, and fuels support for institutional reforms. The book concludes that the Court’s relationship with the public is a critical, fast-moving dynamic that shapes its power, legitimacy, and its complex role within American democracy.

This chapter examines the downstream consequences of ideological conflict between the Supreme Court and the American public, arguing that perceived disagreement directly shapes public attitudes toward the institution. Using survey data that measures the ideological distance between citizens’ own policy preferences and their perceptions of the Court’s rulings, the chapter analyzes three key outcomes: approval, legitimacy, and support for institutional reform. The analysis reveals that as perceived ideological disagreement widens, public approval of the Court declines sharply, particularly among Democrats and the politically knowledgeable. While the Court’s more fundamental legitimacy proves more resilient, it also erodes in the face of sustained ideological conflict. Crucially, this dissatisfaction translates into tangible political pressure, as greater disagreement strongly predicts increased public support for Court-curbing measures like term limits and Court expansion. The 2022 Dobbs decision serves as a powerful case study, illustrating how a single, salient ruling can crystallize perceptions of ideological divergence, leading to a polarized decline in the Court’s institutional standing. Ultimately, the findings demonstrate that a Court seen as ideologically distant from the public risks not only its popularity but also its structural independence.

This chapter uses a video experiment to measure public perceptions of male and female criminal justice officials. The chapter questions whether descriptive representation alone is enough to shift public attitudes.

Human genetic information is best understood as a non-rivalrous and non-excludable social resource, making it well suited to commons-based governance as a complement to state- and market-led models. Using the case of deCODE Genetics in Iceland, the chapter shows the practical viability of such an approach, underscoring the importance of public cooperation, ethical safeguards, and consent. Yet the model faces a central dilemma: the need for broad data sharing to advance research versus the individual participant’s right to privacy. The chapter reframes this tension by conceptualizing privacy not as the negation of sharing but as one of its dimensions. It then resolves the dilemma by proposing a participatory, procedurally legitimate system in which stakeholders (including data contributors, researchers, and clinicians) collectively determine rules of access, use, and privacy through democratic deliberation. This approach moves beyond top-down declarations and instead establishes a self-governing genomic commons. A mutual benefit, procedurally democratic framework offers a promising path to realize the genome’s potential for public health while safeguarding individual rights.

This chapter examines stakeholder perceptions of water quality improvement in watershed collaborations, revealing significant disconnects between perceived and actual environmental outcomes. Using binary response modeling with data from 114 watersheds, the analysis shows that 76% of stakeholders perceive water quality improvements, despite limited evidence of measurable environmental changes demonstrated in previous chapters. Multivariate analysis reveals three key predictors of positive perceptions: presence of watershed partnerships (increasing odds of perceived improvement by over six times), higher population density, and watersheds with greater percentages of white residents. These findings highlight persistent demographic inequities in environmental perceptions that mirror patterns found in actual water quality outcomes. The chapter explores multiple explanations for these optimistic perceptions, including visible collaborative outputs like restoration projects and education programs, enhanced monitoring and communication, and psychological needs for stakeholders to believe their efforts are meaningful. While stakeholder optimism may seem problematic given limited measurable improvements, the analysis suggests collaboration generates valuable social capital and community engagement beyond water quality metrics. The results demonstrate the complex relationship between collaborative governance processes and stakeholder satisfaction, emphasizing that perceived effectiveness serves important legitimacy functions even when environmental outcomes remain elusive, while simultaneously raising concerns about environmental justice implications.