Legitimacy

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

Legitimacy in Public Administration: A Discourse Analysis

Abstract: The Legitimacy Issue and Academic Discourse The Framing of the Issue The Political Background of the Issue The Misfounding of the Field A Selected Intellectual History of the Field I The Founding through Simon's Modernism A Selected Intellectual History of the Field II From Minnowbrook to the Present Beyond Reason

The responsibility to protect? Imposing the ‘Liberal Peace’

Abstract: Since the end of the Cold War, debate over international peacekeeping has been dominated by the question of the so-called ‘right of humanitarian intervention’. Advocates of the right of intervention, largely Western states, have tended to uphold liberal internationalist claims that new international norms prioritizing individual rights to protection promise a framework of liberal peace and that the Realist framework of the Cold War period when state security was viewed as paramount has been superseded. In an attempt to codify and win broader international legitimacy for new interventionist norms, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty released a two-volume report, The Responsibility to Protect, in December 2001. In the light of this report and broader developments in international security in the wake of September 11, this essay suggests that rather than a moral shift away from the rights of sovereignty, the dominance of the liberal peace thesis, in fact, reflects the new balan...

Managing multiple identities: Discourse, legitimacy and resources in the UK refugee system

Abstract: In this article, we examine how the concept of a `refugee' is discursively constituted within the UK refugee system. We examine the actions and interactions of four organizations in particular: the British government, the Refugee Legal Centre, the British Refugee Council and the Refugee Forum, as they struggle to establish an understanding of `refugee' conducive to their goals and interests. Within this institutional field, the social construction of refugees takes place at two different levels: at the broadest level, the idea of a refugee is defined through an ongoing discursive process involving a wide range of actors; while at a more micro level, individual cases are processed by a limited subset of organizations based on this broad definition. We show that while the government controls the processing of individual cases through its formal authority and control of resources, all four organizations participate in the definition of a refugee and they all, therefore, play a role in refugee determination. ...

Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication, and Democracy

Abstract: * Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication, and Democracy. Peter Dahlgren. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 246 pp. $24.99 pbk. This book is more appropriate for graduate courses or seminars, but the content is relevant to any instructor or student who cares about the connections among the media, governments, political organizations, and the public. In the opinion of this reviewer, it is required reading. Peter Dahlgren correctly asserts that "[w]ithout a minimal level of involvement from its citizens, democracy loses legitimacy and may cease to function in a legitimate way." Flagging citizen interest is not the sole factor in charting democracy's decline, of course; Dahlgren adds that media must disseminate information important to the health of any democratic nation. When they skirt that responsibility in favor of "infotainment" or other second-rate presentations of political programming, they opt out of their commitment. "We are awash in media," observes Dahlgren, a media studies professor at Lund University in Sweden, "and most of it is obviously not overtly civicoriented." But Dahlgren also reminds us that society shouldn't expect the media to be the only mechanism for information about government and political agencies. The public needs to be engaged in formal and informal organizations that lead to increased attention to and knowledge of politics. There is one note of caution - opinion leaders typically generate the conversations necessary for an informed public through information they acquire from the media, creating in some cases an echo chamber that advances public discourse little. In his chapter 2, titled "Media Alterations," Dahlgren provides a complex, thorough review of the rise of corporate media and how governmental indifference to it - especially in the United States - allowed media organizations to push aside public-interest programming. One of the effects of this transformation to pop-culture content is that politicians now use the media to advance their policy stances but also to "market their personalities." Ironically, traditional media are falling out of favor as citizens use many delivery platforms for gathering information. (Of course, with the Internet, they also are able to distribute their own information, however inaccurate, opinionated, or inflammatory it might be.) At the same time, they attend to media that offer affirmation of their previously held beliefs. The public also can tune out, and Dahlgren warns this is the most toxic form of disengagement from the political process. One element of this book that instructors could spend considerable time discussing with students is Dahlgren's definitions of civic engagement and political engagement. He doesn't adequately connect these terms to the media, and this incomplete assessment provides another area for classroom conversation. …