Fundamentals of Political Science - October 7, 2022

On State-building and Regimes I: On Legitimation

How to legitimize the state

- Give consent to the state (e.g. participating in elections)
- Lack of resistance toward the state
- Delegitimization is to do the opposite

Overview on regimes
● David Easton: the set formal and informal constraints generally accepted in a
system (voluntarily or necessity) as limiting the processes through which values are
authoritatively allocated.
● It consists of the goals and political values, the norm or rules of the game, and the
structures through which power is organized in a political system.

Defining legitimacy
● Legitimacy is the interaction of trust, satisfaction, and approval of the people
● It is the fundamental acceptance of people to be subjected to laws they understand.
● Therefore, we cannot say that legality is not the same as legitimacy; laws are only as
legitimate as people would like them to be.

● Max Weber: legitimacy serving as the basis of authority since it accounts for people's
willingness to obey something they have faith in.
○ Faith can exist in: (1) tradition, (2) charisma, and/or (3) the law.
○ Something is LEGITIMATE if people BELIEVE that it is.

● Alexandre Kojeve: Authority as an active (involves change, movement, and action)

claim to obedience.
○ Legitimacy as a lack of resistance to such a claim.
○ This, therefore, makes it impossible to have an illegitimate authority.
○ What is legitimate need not be legal and vice versa. Laws as reified/mummified
forms of legitimate authority.

● David Beetham: Three major perspectives

○ Legal perspective - what is legal is automatically legitimate.
○ Moral-philosophical perspective -
○ Social science perspective - focus is to explain the dis/obedience of people,
the stability of systems, and the overall legitimacy of a polity within specific
historical, social, political, and economic conditions.
○ The task is to ground legitimacy and legitimation upon concrete legal and
moral conditions within a specific time period.
○ Re-asserts the importance of consent, (its acquisition, maintenance,
performance, and active conferral) as a factor in measuring legitimacy (contrary
to the Weberian belief in legitimacy as the basis of legitimacy itself).
 ○ Social scientists judge the congruence of a claim to legitimacy with the values,
beliefs, etc. of those who can confer it by expressing or withholding consent.

● Beetham’s Dimensions of Legitimacy

○ It conforms to established rules
○ The rules can be justified by reference to beliefs shared by both the dominant
and subordinate; and
○ There is evidence of consent by the subordinate to the particular power
relation.

Measuring legitimacy and legitimation

● Tackling the components of legitimacy and focusing on legitimation as a process.
● Hetherington (2005) illustrates high levels of trust have allowed the American
government to adopt liberal policies on public health; those that entail costs to the public.
● If people trust the capacity of the government then they are more willing to bear the real
and/or ideological costs of a policy that they need not directly and/or immediately benefit
from.
● Hetherington and Husser (2012) analyze priming or how the media facilitates a shift or
sustenance of the public’s standards of evaluation.
● Media coverage of a policy issue can facilitate the transition of public trust toward policy
preferences. This emphasizes the relative malleability of political trust or at least, its
indirect relationship with policy preferences.
● Specific political support ←→ diffuse political support ←→ legitimacy ←→ regime
stability

Levels of measuring political support

● Political community - support-adoption of national identities
● Regime principles - approval of core regime principles and values
● Regime norms and procedures or evaluations of regime performance
● Confidence in regime institutions
● Confidence in local government
● Political actors - approval of incumbent officeholders