Who Can Speak in a Crisis? Legitimacy, Power and the Limits of Crisis Communication in a Fragmented Health System

ABSTRACT

Crisis communication in public health systems is constrained not only by the availability of communication models, but also by the dispersion of legitimacy across multiple actors. While existing literature often assumes a coherent organisational actor capable of unified strategic action, this article shows that in institutionally fragmented systems, formal authority, expert legitimacy and public credibility may be distributed across different actors. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of social fields, the study introduces the concept of legitimacy misalignment to analyse how power relations and distributed sources of legitimacy shape crisis communication in the Slovenian public health system. The study combines contextual survey data with qualitative material from three focus groups and six in‐depth interviews ( N  = 29). The findings show that institutional fragmentation, hierarchical filtering and the misalignment between formal authority, expert legitimacy and public credibility constrain coherent communication. The article contributes to crisis communication research by demonstrating how legitimacy misalignment limits the practical feasibility of organisation‐centred models in multi‐actor public health contexts. It shifts analytical attention from strategy selection to the structural conditions of communicative action.