Legitimacy

About: Legitimacy is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 26153 publications have been published within this topic receiving 565921 citations.

Interdependence and democratic legitimation

Abstract: The premise of the Bellagio Project on Democracy has been that, in recent decades, Western democracies have come to suffer a decline of political "trust" or "confidence" in, or popular "satisfaction" with, the "performance" of their representative institutions, and that this decline needs to be taken seriously as a potential threat to the viability of democratic government (Putnam 1998). The terms used also suggest that the project starts from an implicit principal-agent model in which citizens-as-principals have come to be dissatisfied with the performance of their political agents. If we assume that this is empirically true, and that the change does reflect a deterioration of perceived performance, rather than the rising (or increasingly conflicting) expectations of citizen-principals, there still are two fundamentally different working hypotheses from which one might begin the search for an explanation. Growing dissatisfaction could be caused by factors that have reduced the fidelity of agents -- i.e., their willingness to act in the interest of their principals. But it also could be caused by factors that have constrained the objective capacity of agents to achieve the outcomes expected by principals. Whereas the project as a whole is exploring the first of these working hypotheses, my own paper will focus on a particular type of capacity constraints: growing international economic interdependence. In doing so, I will not review the empirical evidence regarding changes in the levels of popular satisfaction, except to note the high degree of variance among countries (Newton, 1998; Katzenstein 1998). Instead, I will examine the analytical and normative arguments that could link economic internationalization to citizen satisfaction, and ultimately to the democratic legitimacy of national political systems. I will argue that one should indeed expect such links to exist, but that their effect on legitimacy will be strongly mediated by the characteristics of national political discourses.

Remarks on legitimation through human rights

Abstract: In this essay I use the term 'legitimation' (and the associated term 'legitimacy') in a doubly restricted sense: I am referring, first, to the legitimation of political systems and, second, only to the legitimation of constitutional democracies. I begin by recalling a proposal I have made for reconstructing the internal relation between democracy and human rights. 2 I then briefly examine a few of the aspects under which this Western style of legitimation is criticized today - whether in the discourse among Western theorists or in the discourses between other cultures and the West.

Power and Legitimacy: Reconciling Europe and the Nation-State

Abstract: The implications of European integration for national democracy and constitutionalism are well known. Nevertheless, as the events of the last decade made clear, the EU's complex system of governance has been unable to achieve a democratic or constitutional legitimacy in its own right. In Power and Legitimacy: Reconciling Europe and the Nation-State, Peter L. Lindseth traces the roots of this paradox to integration's dependence on the postwar constitutional settlement of administrative governance on the national level. Supranational policymaking has relied on various forms of oversight from national constitutional bodies, following models that were first developed in the administrative state and then translated into the European context. These national oversight mechanisms (executive, legislative, and judicial) have over the last half-century developed to address the central disconnect in the integration process: between the need for supranational regulatory power, on the one hand, and the persistence of national constitutional legitimacy, on the other. In defining the ways European public law has sought to reconcile these two conflicting demands, Professor Lindseth lays the foundation for a better understanding of the "administrative, not constitutional" nature of European governance going forward.

Reconsidering convergence and converger legitimacy in response to the world trade center disaster

Abstract: The World Trade Center disaster generated many of the features seen in other disasters in the U.S., including post-disaster convergence. We conceptualize emergency management activities as taking place within a multilocational “response milieu,” and we suggest that the study of convergence should focus on the negotiated legitimacy of people in and wishing to enter it. We discuss the five types of personal convergers and how the access of each of these groups to the response milieu was related to their legitimation status. We then identify two additional forms of convergence: supporters or fans, and those who came to mourn or to memorialize. We conclude by discussing implications for policy.