Legitimacy

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

A Neo‐Gramscian Approach to Corporate Political Strategy: Conflict and Accommodation in the Climate Change Negotiations*

Abstract: A neo-Gramscian theoretical framework for corporate political strategy is developed drawing from Gramsci's analysis of the relations among capital, social forces, and the state, and from more contemporary theories. Gramsci's political theory recognizes the centrality of organizations and strategy, directs attention to the organizational, economic, and ideological pillars of power, while illuminating the processes of coalition building, conflict, and accommodation that drive social change. This approach addresses the structure-agency relationship and endogenous dynamics in a way that could enrich institutional theory. The framework suggests a strategic concept of power, which provides space for contestation by subordinate groups in complex dynamic social systems. We apply the framework to analyse the international negotiations to control emissions of greenhouse gases, focusing on the responses of firms in the US and European oil and automobile industries. The neo- Gramscian framework explains some specific features of corporate responses to challenges to their hegemonic position and points to the importance of political struggles within civil society The analysis suggests that the conventional demarcation between market and non-market strategies is untenable, given the embeddedness of markets in contested social and political structures and the political character of strategies directed toward defending and enhancing markets, technologies, corporate autonomy and legitimacy.

On the Legitimacy of National High Courts

Abstract: The purpose of this research is to examine theories of diffuse support and institutional legitimacy by testing hypotheses about the interrelationships among the salience of courts, satisfaction with court outputs, and diffuse support for national high courts. Like our predecessors, we are constrained by essentially cross-sectional data; unlike them, we analyze mass attitudes toward high courts in eighteen countries. Because our sample includes many countries with newly formed high courts, our cross-sectional data support several longitudinal inferences, using the age of the judicial institution as an independent variable. We discover that the U.S. Supreme Court is not unique in the esteem in which it is held and, like other courts, it profits from a tendency of people to credit it for pleasing decisions but not to penalize it for displeasing ones. Generally, older courts more successfully link specific and diffuse support, most likely due to satisfying successive, nonoverlapping constituencies.

Institutional change in large law firms: a resource dependency and institutional perspective

Abstract: We integrate resource dependency and institutional theory to argue that resource scarcity drives, and legitimacy enables, institutional change. Building on a historical account, we examine the sources and timing of innovation departing from standard human resource practices using event history analysis of over 200 principal offices of large law firms. Offices with human resource scarcity innovated to acquire alternative resources; highly prestigious offices had the legitimacy to be first or early adopters. Our findings highlight the value of looking to the resource side and to the notion of legitimacy in building an institutional theory of change.

Ethnicity, patronage and the african state: the politics of uncivil nationalism

Abstract: Recent research has revealed that modern African ethnicity is a social construction of the colonial period through the reactions of pre-colonial societies to the social, economic, cultural and political forces of colonialism. Ethnicity is the product of a continuing historical process, always simultaneously old and new, grounded in the past and perpetually in creation. Colonial states were grounded in the alliances with local 'Big Men', incorporating ethnically-defined administrative units linked to the local population by incorporation of pre-colonial patron-client relations. This was reinforced by European assumptions of neatly bounded and culturally homogeneous 'tribes' and a bureaucratic preoccupation with demarcating, classifying and counting subject populations, as well as by the activities of missionaries and anthropologists. African ethnic invention emerged through internal struggles over moral economy and political legitimacy tied to the definition of ethnic communities—moral ethnicity; and external conflicts over differential access to the resources of modernity and economic accumulation—political tribalism. Ethnicities were, in particular, the creations of elites seeking the basis for a conservative modernization. The colonial legacy of bureaucratic authoritarianism, pervasive patron-client relations, and a complex ethnic dialectic of assimilation, fragmentation and competition has persisted in post-colonial societies. Patron-client networks remain the fundamental state-society linkage in circumstances of social crisis and uncertainty and have extended to the very centre of the state. This accounts for the personalistic, materialistic and opportunistic character of African politics. Such networks also penetrate institutions of civil society and liberal democracy, undermining programmes of socio-economic and political reform.

Political representation and legitimacy in the European Union

Abstract: How severe a problem is what many call the ‘democratic deficit’ of the EU? Despite a voluminous theoretical literature dealing with this question, there is hardly any systematic empirical investigation of the effectiveness of the system of political representation in the EU, and of the legitimacy beliefs of EU citizens that spring from it. This book elaborates a conceptual framework for the empirical analysis of the alleged democratic deficit. Four dimensions of legitimacy beliefs are identified and analysed: the European political community; the scope of EU government; the institutions and processes of EU government; and EU policies. Based upon large-scale representative surveys (the ‘European Representation Study’) among the mass publics, and different strata of the political elite of the EU and its member-states, the book examines the conditions of political representation in the EU. The results demonstrate, by and large, that legitimacy beliefs of EU citizens are the more positive the less specific the object of identification and evaluations is, and that the process of political representation works pretty well as long as issues other than EU issues are concerned. These findings are finally discussed in view of familiar strategies for institutional reform of the EU. The book is arranged in two main parts: I. Legitimacy (4 Chs) and II. Representation ( 6Chs); it also has an introduction, a conclusion, and an appendix giving details of the European Representation Study. The book is one of two companion volumes that report on the results of this study. The other is The European Parliament, the National Parliaments, and European Integration (edited by Richard S. Katz and Bernhard Wessels), and is also published by OUP.