The Concept of Public Interest

In The Routledge Handbook of Planning Theory, 2018

Planning has traditionally considered the public interest as its principal criterion of justification. The notion of the public interest has traditionally provided the raison d’être for planning. The situation is completely different today. The concept of the public interest has come under severe attack. It is in fact, today, a commonplace in the planning literature to say that the public interest does not exist. But the statement “the public interest does not exist” can be interpreted in four different ways (usually not clearly demarcated in the debate) that correspond to quite different arguments on the ‘inexistence’ of the public interest. The chapter critically revisit these arguments. The conclusion is that it is not easy to refute the concept of the public interest. We are obviously free to abandon the term “public interest” if we do not like it; but if we do so, we will simply have to deal with the same problem under some other label: determining justifiable public intervention in the face of diversity is crucial for any political order.

Journal of Public Affairs, 2020

The article is a theoretical and semantic analysis of the concept of Public Interest. It starts with a focus on the ambiguity of the concepts of interest and public, whose different interpretations directly impact the understanding of the expression "Public Interest." An examination follows of the most important contributions in the literature on the idea of Public Interest. A distinction is then drawn between the concept and different conceptions of it. In particular, I propose a typology of five ideal-typical conceptions of the Public Interest: formal, substantive, realist, aggregative, and procedural. For each conception, I highlight the constitutive elements and the relevant consequences in their respective visions of democracy and of lobbying. Some expectations are finally advanced on the uses of the various conceptions in actual policymaking contexts.

2003

Perhaps the most fundamental question in contemporary European Union politics is whether the existing division and sharing of competences between national and supranational levels is pragmatically and normatively justifiable. In his classic book, Governing in Europe (1999), Fritz Scharpf argues that the current policy mix is sub-optimal and, therefore, democratically illegitimate, because the multi-level European polity lacks the 'problem-solving capacity' necessary to permit citizens and their representatives to bargain to optimal outcomes. Instead it is likely to trigger a vicious circle of downward adaptations in social policy and public services that are likely to sap the EU's support. Scharpf recommends granting domestic social welfare policies constitutional status in EU jurisprudence, and permitting 'differentiated integration' or 'flexibility' for high-standard countries to legislate as an EU subgroup. In this challenge by Scharpf to the 'output legitimacy' of the EU, we argue, a number of important issues remain unresolved. First, his argument rests on an implicit and insufficiently elaborated conception of the public interest in maintaining or expanding current patterns of social welfare protection. Second, any effort to specify this "public interest" must address three fundamental problems of democratic theory, namely the status of uninformed or inexpert citizens, underlying biases in democratic representation, and proper scope of majoritarian decision-making. Third, and fully in the spirit of the concerns raised in Governing in Europe, we suggest two possible strategies for addressing these concerns and some tools for rethinking output legitimacy and its relation both to the 'public interest' and to participatory procedures. The research agenda on democratic legitimacy in Europe launched by Scharpf is likely to be a lively one for some time to come. 1 We wish to thank Gary Marks and Anne-Marie Slaughter for useful discussions about the subject of this paper. This paper is scheduled to appear in an edited volume on the political economy of advanced industrial societies. 2 E.g. Fritz Scharpf Crisis and Choice in European Social Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). This focus on institutions may very well reflect the fact that Scharpf, almost alone among leading European political economists, received graduate training not primarily as an economist or public policy analyst, but as a lawyer-and, importantly, at Yale University in the United States at the apogee of American 'legal realism.' 3 E.g. Fritz Scharpf, "Europäisches Demokratie und deutscher Föderalismus," Staatswissenschaft und Staatspraxis 3 (1992): 296-306.

2010

Although the idea of the public interest features prominently in many accounts of deliberative democracy, the relationship between deliberative democracy and the public interest is rarely spelt out with any degree of precision. In this article, I identify and defend one particular way of framing this relationship. I begin by arguing that people can deliberate about the public interest only if the public interest is in principle identifiable independently of their deliberations. Of course, some pluralists claim that the public interest is an implausible idea, which casts doubt on the idea that there might be something for people to deliberate about. Yet while, following Brian Barry, we can get around this problem by defining the public interest as an interest in which everyone shares qua member of the public, what still needs to be explained is why people should be prepared to privilege this particular capacity. I argue that the account of political equality with which deliberative democracy is bound up offers a compelling explanation of this sort, even if it also gives rise to some difficult questions of feasibility. I conclude by considering the charge that any political scheme that framed the relationship between deliberative democracy and the public interest in this way would be undesirable.

2013

International Journal of Law and Society, 2023

References to public interest are abundant in legal scholarship, jurisprudence, and legislation. However, the meaning of interest still remains rather a common sense idea without legible standards or criteria. The article offers to conceptualize it in a broader socio-historical context, as this concept cannot be treated in isolation from the evolution of the Western scientific paradigm that aspires to rationalize the world, to rationally explain and construct a cognitive map of both social and natural environments. To explore the history of "interest" in law means to grasp and reconstruct the phases of the fundamental revolution that legal thought has undergone since the mid-XVIII century. The article offers a bird-eye view of how the concept of interest gained currency and infiltrated law. This evolutionary perspective could explain certain coherence and similarity of various meanings proposed for the concept of interest in case law and scholarship. The article argues that interest becomes socially recognizable and viable when it is perceived and interpreted as such. It acquires validity in legal argumentation if it fits into the cultural schemata of legal framing. The article purports to deconstruct interest as a category. It argues that three key assumptions underpin the concept: (1) interests are social constructs; (2) interests are generated by argumentation (to qualify as interest an existing or perceived good, purpose, motive, aspiration, or claim requires argumentation that triggers "frames of interest"-cognitive representations and constructs); (3) interests are vehicles whereby normative ideas of justice, society, and the world, generated and validated by other normative orders, are adapted, legitimized and incorporated into law. The article discusses the practical implications of these assumptions. In a judicial proceeding, public interest analysis should explore the central organizing idea of a public interest argumentation against three analytical components: (1) substantive (refers to the interest analysis); (2) quantitative (refers to the "society"/ "public" analysis); and (3) qualitative (refers to analysis focusing on whether the argumentation triggers cognitive representations and constructs that reference moral principles). Finally, the reconceptualization of interest as a social construct can shed new light on legal argumentation and the so-called "five Is of legal reasoning": intuitiveness, incidentality, indeterminacy, ideology, and irrationality. Though indeed often intuition-driven, interest as a social construct that fits into legal framing is not incidental, indeterminate, or irrational. Incrementing and unfolding via interaction and competition with discourses and legal frames, interests bring in certainty, predictability, and determinacy to open-ended concepts of law.

Political Studies

Within natural law theories of jurisprudence and politics, the common good serves as a shared normative reason that guides political deliberation and the acceptance of its outcomes. In the current paper, I argue that this conception of the common good is the most suitable value to ground a direct justification of political authority. The common good is better placed than rival moral and political values to ground a direct justification, I claim, for three related reasons. First, the common good is the right kind of value to serve in a justification of political authority insofar as it is a reason for action which provides a convincing answer to the fundamental normative question: “why have authority at all?” Second, the common good allows for a justification of political authority that pertains to a complete political community – paradigmatically, but not necessarily, a nation state – rather than subjects taken individually. Third, and perhaps most decisively, the common good allows for a reconciliation of two apparently conflicting features of political authority, namely that (1) its ultimate role is to promote the good of individuals and (2) it can require the subordination of the good of the individual to the good of the community. My argument proceeds in two stages. In section 1 I first provide a brief exposition and defence of Stephen Perry’s view that it is necessary to provide a direct justification of political authority. A direct justification is one that begins with a demonstration of the value or good that is served by political authority, regarded as a Hohfledian power, and accounts for the normative force of particular directives on that basis. I then elaborate on some implications of this claim for the normative force of legal directives. In section 2 I demonstrate why the common good is the best candidate to play the central normative role in a direct justification. I also argue that the most plausible rival value – justice – is a constituent of the common good.

2009

Public Policy and Administration, 2020

In various sciences, the term legitimacy is used with differing meanings. In practice, in law it is the legitimacy of the legislative act, in political science it is the legitimacy of power, etc. Even the term interest, or public interest,, is interpreted differently in various sciences (in law, economics, political science, etc.). In public policy theory, P. Rosanvallon’s understanding of democratic legitimacy proves to be productive, together with F. W. Scharpf’s input and output legitimacy, which leads to a differentiation between the input legitimacy of group interests and the output legitimacy of interests, legitimated by the public.