Legitimacy is a psychological property of an authority, institution, or social arrangement that leads those connected to it to believe that it is appropriate, proper, and just. Because of legitimacy, people feel that they ought to defer to decisions and rules, following them voluntarily out of obligation rather than out of fear of punishment or anticipation of reward. Being legitimate is important to the success of authorities, institutions, and institutional arrangements since it is difficult to exert influence over others based solely upon the possession and use of power. Being able to gain voluntary acquiescence from most people, most of the time, due to their sense of obligation increases effectiveness during periods of scarcity, crisis, and conflict. The concept of legitimacy has a long history within social thought and social psychology, and it has emerged as increasingly important within recent research on the dynamics of political, legal, and social systems.

Psychological perspectives on legitimacy and legitimation.

After addressing the meaning of “trust” and “trustworthiness,” we review survey-based research on citizens' judgments of trust in governments and politicians, and historical and comparative case study research on political trust and government trustworthiness. We first provide an overview of research in these two traditions, and then take up four topics in more detail: (a) political trust and political participation; (b) political trust, public opinion, and the vote; (c) political trust, trustworthy government, and citizen compliance; and (d) political trust, social trust, and cooperation. We conclude with a discussion of fruitful directions for future research.

Political Trust and Trustworthiness

Scholars have debated the importance of declining political trust to the American political system. By primarily treating trust as a dependent variable, however, scholars have systematically underestimated its relevance. This study establishes the importance of trust by demonstrating that it is simultaneously related to measures of both specific and diffuse support. In fact, trust's effect on feelings about the incumbent president, a measure of specific support, is even stronger than the reverse. This provides a fundamentally different understanding of the importance of declining political trust in recent years. Rather than simply a reflection of dissatisfaction with political leaders, declining trust is a powerful cause of this dissatisfaction. Low trust helps create a political environment in which it is more difficult for leaders to succeed.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003055400215827

The Political Relevance of Political Trust

Many fear that democracies are suffering from a legitimacy crisis. This book focuses on 'democratic deficits', reflecting how far the perceived democratic performance of any state diverges from public expectations. Pippa Norris examines the symptoms by comparing system support in more than fifty societies worldwide, challenging the pervasive claim that most established democracies have experienced a steadily rising tide of political disaffection during the third-wave era. The book diagnoses the reasons behind the democratic deficit, including demand (rising public aspirations for democracy), information (negative news about government) and supply (the performance and structure of democratic regimes). Finally, Norris examines the consequences for active citizenship, for governance and, ultimately, for democratization. This book provides fresh insights into major issues at the heart of comparative politics, public opinion, political culture, political behavior, democratic governance, political psychology, political communications, public policymaking, comparative sociology, cross-national survey analysis and the dynamics of the democratization process.

Democratic Deficit: Critical Citizens Revisited

Using surveys conducted in sixteen mature and newly established democracies around the globe, this study examines the effect of corruption on people's attitudes toward government. The analysis demonstrates that citizens in countries with higher levels of corruption express more negative evaluations of the performance of the political system and exhibit lower levels of trust in civil servants. However, the results also show that the negative effect of corruption on evaluations of the political system is significantly attenuated among supporters of the incumbent political authorities. These findings provide strong and systematic evidence that informal political practices, especially those that compromise important democratic principles, should be considered important indicators of political system performance. Moreover, they imply that, while corruption is a powerful determinant of political support across widely varying political, cultural, and economic contexts, it does not uniformly diminish support for political institutions across all segments of the electorate.

Corruption, Political Allegiances, and Attitudes Toward Government in Contemporary Democracies

Political legitimacy is a key concept in both macro and micro theories. Pioneers in survey-based research on alienation and system support envisioned addressing macro questions about legitimacy with the sophisticated empiricism of individual-level methodology but failed; and a succession of innovations in item wording and questionnaire construction only led to an excessive concern with measurement issues at the individual level. I return to an enumeration of the informational requirements for assessing legitimacy in hopes of finding a conceptualization that better utilizes available survey indicators to tap relevant macro dimensions. I specify formal measurement models for both conventional and revised conceptualizations of legitimacy orientations and compare the fit of the two models systematically on data from the U.S. electorate. The revised model appears preferable on both theoretical and empirical grounds.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003055400087037

Measuring Political Legitimacy.

Much of the literature on political support is of little use to policy makers or those attempting to understand ordinary politics, because the concepts guiding research have focused attention on extreme cases of little relevance. If we are to interpret political support in terms of regime stability, then it is seldom at issue in advanced democratic societies; but if it indicates only approval for authorities, then direct measures of popularity do the job better. This paper works toward an empirical conceptualization of political support intermediate along that continuum by investigating the relationship between support orientations and the public's evaluation of governmental policy performance. Empirical hypotheses are drawn from an elaboration of the policy-relevant aspects of political support, and of the support-relevant aspects of policy evaluations. These hypotheses are tested against the American public's responses to the government's management of the economy, and they reveal several patterns useful to interpreting changes in the level of political support.

How does government performance influence political support

Declining trust in politicians and political institutions is one of the most dramatic and well-documented trends in American public opinion. Confidence in religious, educational and other institutions has also waned, but emphasis has focused on diminished political trust, both because it may summarize a wide range of diffuse grievances and because it might indicate an increased potential for disruptive action, political violence and instability. In the decade from 1968 to 1978, the level of political trust (measured by the conventional five-item CPS/NES index) was halved, the proportion of the public expressing moderate or high levels of trust falling from 64 to 33 per cent. The greatest decline in the index level (a drop of 14 points) occurred between 1972 and 1974.

Economic ‘Stagflation’ and Public Support for the Political System

Do presidents incorporate the preferences of the public into their foreign policy decisions? Previous scholarship has begun to sketch out the sources of variation in the policy–public opinion linkage, but we still lack a clear understanding of the factors that increase or decrease presidential responsiveness. To better explore the relationship, we conceptualize presidential foreign policy making as a five-stage process—problem representation, option generation, policy selection, implementation, and policy review—arguing that the degree to which presidents are responsive to public opinion varies with fluctuations in public attentiveness. At stages in which public interest is high, presidents are more likely to incorporate mass preferences into their decision making than during stages of public quiescence. The key finding in our analysis of 34 foreign policy cases is that the public's “issue-attention cycle” varies systematically across foreign policy crises and noncrises. Examining these cycles of attention allows us to make predictions about the conditions under which public opinion is most likely to influence decision making.

Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: The Stages of Presidential Decision Making

Despite calls for research-based policies, other types of evidence also influence education policy, including personal experience, professional expertise, and normative values. This article focuses on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative, examining how research use varied over stages of the process and how it was integrated with other types of evidence. By drawing on elite interviews, we find that CCSS promoters and developers used evidence in much the way that policy analysis research would predict and that while research evidence was a major resource, it was combined with other types of evidence depending on political and policy goals at different stages of the CCSS process.

/pdf/evidence-use-and-the-common-core-state-standards-movement-4dpt6fy41r.pdf

M. Stephen Weatherford

Papers

Measuring Political Legitimacy.

How does government performance influence political support

Economic ‘Stagflation’ and Public Support for the Political System

Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: The Stages of Presidential Decision Making

Evidence Use and the Common Core State Standards Movement: From Problem Definition to Policy Adoption