Legitimacy

Political legitimacy refers primarily to the quality of a political order or a political institution in which power is exercised, an issue that is often contested in the global era. There are two sides to the concept of legitimacy. From a normative perspective, it refers to the normative validity of a political order and its justificatory claims—that is, the Anerkennungswürdigkeit of a political order. From a descriptive perspective, in contrast, the focus is on the societal acceptance of political decisions and political orders, the belief in legitimacy or, in the words of Max Weber, Legitimitätsglaube. Thus, where power is regularly exercised according to justifiable rules and with some consent, we can call it legitimate.

This two-sided understanding of legitimacy includes both normative and descriptive components. It is different from a purely normative theory of justice or just political order in that it is rooted in historical practices of legitimation and the belief of people about legitimacy. The two-sided understanding of political legitimacy is also different from a purely behavioralist view of it, as is the dominant reading of Weber's work on legitimacy. Within this tradition, Seymour Martin Lipset (1960) argues that legitimacy “involves the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate and proper ones for the society” (p. 64).

There are two important arguments against the behavioralist view. First, conceived in this way, it strips the social scientist of any competence to make judgments about legitimacy, because she or he is compelled to report data about the beliefs of actors. Second, a merely behavioralist definition of legitimacy shifts the most relevant questions about the relationship between different normative principles and societal support out of the spotlight. In other words, “a given power relationship is not legitimate because people believe in its legitimacy, but because it can be justified in terms of their beliefs” (Beetham, 1991, p. 11). This entry follows an understanding of legitimacy that involves both the normative validity of an order and the beliefs in its legitimacy and focuses on modern legitimacy under conditions of globalization.