Government Officials' Perceptions of Legitimate Governance Arrangements—Does a Representative Orientation Matter?

ABSTRACT Government officials are key actors in managing processes of institutional design and reorganization in increasingly emergent and diversified public structures. This study expands on a framework for assessing the predictive strength of key legitimacy dimensions on officials' governance preferences. The framework is applied to officials' preferences for third‐party and collaborative governance arrangements. The study is based on data from a for‐purpose designed survey conducted among Finnish top‐level government officials. The findings show that officials' governance preferences are strongly contingent on their perceptions of political rules as well as procedural norms pertinent to the representative structures they serve. The article thus contributes to the field of governance research with a focus on the interface between representative government and governance structures. Furthermore, the applied legitimacy framework proved fruitful for addressing the problem of indeterminacy that characterizes many legitimacy concepts. The approach has considerable comparative potentials for predicting governance preferences but also effects of legitimacy perceptions in a wider sense.