LEGITIPREP ‑ Boundaries of Legitimation: Crisis Normalization and Preparedness

Civil preparedness is a social process involving many and diverse actors. It is not a separate activity; rather, it constitutes what governments, including governmental agencies, do, or should be doing, to ensure that they provide societal safety. LEGITIPREP is focused on the legitimacy of governmental functions aimed at developing crisis preparedness. We focus on the functions of crisis leadership, the production of expert knowledge, and policy entrepreneurial action that is, creative actions that aim to affect change, all of which are operationalized as political dimensions of crisis prepardness. The underlying hypothesis of LEGITIPREP is that understanding the legitimization of expert knowledge, leadership, and policy entrepreneurial action during crises informs preparedness because it illuminates that which is legitimized and the locus and mode in which legitimacy occurs.

The chief purpose of LEGITIPREP is to develop an empirically grounded conceptual framework to understand and parse the legitimization process of government interventions aimed at managing crises and mitigating threats. Empirically, we focus on the national contexts of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and the governmental interventions during (i) the C OVID-19 pandemic and (ii) the antagonist threat that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has posed to the Nordic countries. We employ corpus network analysis, elite interviews, media analysis, and social media network analysis to conduct the comparative case analysis.