Legitimacy Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Legitimacy is one of the most enduring concepts in modern political science, going back to the opening question of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762) of whether “there can be any sure and legitimate rule of administration.” It is a concept that spans both empirical and normative political science, and it is one that is widely invoked in everyday political debate.

Legitimacy is often used interchangeably with the terms political trust and political support. However, it is a distinctive form of trust or support. Legitimacy refers to the rightfulness of a political object. The word rightfulness refers to whether something is consistent with a set of norms prevalent in a given political community. In particular, political rightfulness has been defined by David Beetham in his 1991 book The Legitimation of Power as consisting of three distinct subtypes: whether a political object accords with the rules and laws of a political community, whether a political object accords with the values and morality of a political community, and whether a political object has secured the willing consent of a political community. Bruce Gilley refers in his 2009 work The Right to Rule: How States Win and Lose Legitimacy to these three subtypes as legality, justification, and consent, and shows how they can be measured empirically using a combination of attitudinal and behavioral data.

Objects And Subjects Of Legitimacy

The political objects of legitimacy can take many forms: states, governments, regime types, specific institutions like courts, public policies and laws, political rhetoric, political leaders, or international organizations. While such objects are analytically distinct, in practice the legitimacy of one may exert an impact on the legitimacy of another, as when an unpopular government shakes faith in a state itself.

The relevant subjects of legitimacy range from all global citizens to just a single individual, depending on how the concept is being used. If we are concerned with how legitimacy affects the durability of authoritarian regimes, we may consider new economic classes or military rulers as the most salient subjects. More broadly, such subjective or positive approaches may include all citizens of a given political community, or even all global citizens. For political philosophers, the most salient subject is the philosopher themselves, or more broadly the community of learned individuals engaged in logical reasoning about the meaning of political rightfulness. Such objective or normative approaches thus select their relevant subjects as those holding the most valid set of reasoned arguments. Finally, legitimacy can be treated as a dichotomous or a continuous variable.

The term legitimacy crisis is frequently used by political commentators as well as political scientists when discussing the public response to political power. In general, claims of legitimacy crisis have tended to over predict actual legitimacy crises, suggesting the need for both historical and cross-national context. Many of today’s developing countries, from Bangladesh to Egypt, as well as most states in Africa, are frequently described as facing a legitimacy crisis, even as they endure year after year. In particular, it is necessary to distinguish between legitimacy and justice. While justice refers to particularistic views of the good society and how political object can serve that end, legitimacy refers to a broader consensus on the appropriate uses of political power and the feasibility of alternatives to the given political object.

Legitimation

Five main schools of thought exist on the question of what generates legitimacy. One might be called localism, the view that legitimacy is a context-specific concept without universal features. Another is sociopsychological, stating that legitimacy is derivative of the social or psychological features of the citizenry. A third school, developmentalism, finds the sources of legitimacy in the economic and welfare attainments of the political object. A fourth, liberalism, stresses the overarching importance of the provision of an extensive range of rights and freedoms, including democracy. Finally, bureaucratism emphasizes the effectiveness and rationality of the object.

The legitimation process is an interactive process in which there are competing evaluations of how well the political object has responded to the demands of a pluralistic society in terms of its rightfulness. The legitimacy of a massive hydroelectric dam project, for example, may derive from its development impact as well as its being a manifestation of democratic policy making and effective bureaucratic implementation. These “sources” thus generate legitimacy by being legal, justified, and consented to.

For the critic of legitimacy, the process of legitimation is marred by the hegemonic influence of certain powerful or better off groups that shape not only the evaluation of a political object but also the basis on which such evaluations are made. Legitimacy is thus a result of some form of “false consciousness” or “fettered imagination.”

Closely related to the latter question is the question of why legitimacy matters. German sociologist Max Weber, who pioneered the empirical study of legitimacy, believed that legitimate power, also known as authority, was necessary for the modern state because of its extensive regulation of society.

Both defenders and critics of the legitimation process often agree that legitimacy is critical to sustaining certain political objects—philosopher Karl Marx believed that falsely implanted legitimacy was central to the preservation of capitalism while political scientist Freidrich Hayek argued that capitalism’s genuine popularity was critical to its durability. Marx and Hayek differed only on the normative defensibility of legitimacy. This “strong hypothesis” about legitimacy is that it is a central, if not the central, force in determining political outcomes, whether domestic or international.

Effects Of Legitimacy

In line with the strong hypothesis, leitimacy has been invoked to explain state-building, democratization, and social revolutions, as well as international outcomes such as propensity for war and international cooperation. In this view, legitimacy is the motive force in politics without which the structural or voluntaristic factors often invoked to explain various political outcomes would be rendered inoperable.

A weaker hypothesis about legitimacy’s effects is that while its direct consequences are uncertain, it is nonetheless a critical concept in structuring political argument and debate. Here, the study of legitimacy is directed mainly to “unmasking” certain rhetorical claims found in the political arena.

Finally, for the philosopher, as well as the sociologist, there is a normative hypothesis: legitimacy is a great moral good. People are happier, and their position is morally superior, when they relate to political objects on the basis of a shared morality rather than as strategic or interest-maximizing agents whose behavior is subject to “command and control” by the state. To know whether a political object is legitimate is thus an end unto itself.

Bibliography:

Barker, Rodney. Political Legitimacy and the State. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
Beetham, David. The Legitimation of Power. London: Macmillan, 1991.
Buchanan, Allen. Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-determination: Moral Foundations for International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Clark, Ian. Legitimacy in International Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Coicaud, Jean-Marc. Legitimacy and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Gilley, Bruce. The Right to Rule: How States Win and Lose Legitimacy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
Habermas, Jürgen. Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon, 1975.

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