Legitimacy refers to the moral authority of public decision-makers and processes. It helps to ensure that the decisions of duly constituted powers are accepted even by citizens who disagree with them. This is essential to civic life. We tend to think of democratic legitimacy as the norm, but in fact only a modest minority of countries are fully functioning democracies. The relatively exceptional nature of democratic legitimacy makes its erosion in a benchmark democracy like the US a matter of global concern.
There are at least four ways in which legitimacy has been retreating in certain democracies, with the US taking an unhappy lead. The first is a slide toward populism, which leads toward charismatic rather than rational-legal legitimacy. The second is a decline in the stature and independence of public institutions. The third is the growth of a winner-take-all approach to the exercise of power, and a corresponding villainization of policy differences and political opponents.
The fourth is the declining capacity of mainstream media to support civil discourse. While all democratic leaders want to be popular, populism is a distinct beast. Populists, no matter how privileged, present themselves as outsiders battling that elite.
In its uglier variants, populism turns segments of the population against one another. Our Vision for Government Building on our previous research around shared power, legitimacy, and experimentation, we present an emerging vision for the future of government. Innovation in the Face of Crisis Insights from European cities' rapid and creative reactions to the pandemic. The Shared Power Principle Think what could happen if governments shared power to create positive outcomes for people?
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Blog Read how leaders are transforming lives and achieving public impact. Partnering for impact Projects and research conducted with other government changemakers in our global network. About Us What we do What we do, how we work, who and where we are. Go back. Dan Vogel Director, North America.
Article highlights. Share article. Methodology The following results come from a representative survey of over Americans, using a repurposed brand-loyalty approach from the private sector. Interested in government legitimacy and creating authentic connections? You may also be interested in By Willie Mae Knight. By Dr. Francesco Branca. Over time, Plan Colombia has helped create a peace process that appears poised to end a year-old insurgency.
The lessons learned from Plan Colombia can inform the broader U. Confronted with what seem like immense challenges to national security, some political voices in the United States on both the left and the right want to try to seal America off from the world rather than continue its leadership and engagement.
But these days, many of the greatest threats—from terrorism to pandemic disease—know no borders, and these critics ignore the fact that there is no way for the United States to withdraw inward and avoid threats from abroad. Others seek instead a return to the previous decade when the United States misused its military and gutted its economic strength.
For them, anything short of the use of U. But the wasteful employment of American power through so-called preventive war in Iraq and a costly military occupation has already proven disastrous.
More than 10 years later, this approach remains sound, and U. Not only will this provide the best chance for the United States to prevent and manage transnational threats to the nation, but it will also improve the quality of life for the people of these countries—the most sustainable long-term path to upholding global security.
Trevor Sutton. Peter Gordon Director, Government Affairs. You Might Also Like. The objective approach would answer the question by referring to the failure of that government to satisfy the minimum moral requirements it establishes for a government, and so would decide that it was not legitimate regardless of how some people felt about it.
There are assorted theories for how people might come to believe in the legitimacy of a rule or a rules-system. One model suggests that people see as legitimate those institutions or rules that benefit them. This self-serving account of legitimation is consistent with the theoretical model of instrumental rationality and is popular in rational-choice models of social life. It follows from the common-sense notion that actors are more likely to believe as normatively right arrangements that seem to serve their interests.
A second model suggests that legitimacy follows the act of consenting to a rule or ruler. This is the approach put forward by John Locke and is a common element in democratic theory. In liberal theory, consent is the process of voluntarily accepting to be bound by a structure of authority and it is the crucial step in reconciling freedom and obligation. This view treats legitimacy as a contract that transfers authority between the individual and the institution. Consent is central to international law, as it is to domestic contract law, and leads to the common claim that actors should feel a legitimate obligation not just a legal obligation to those commitments to which they have consented.
Both the self-interest and the consent theories of legitimation side-step some interesting questions about legitimacy in practice. Similarly, why is it that people can sometimes be socialized to accept as legitimate institutions which seem to outsiders to directly endanger their interests? Much of what is interesting about the power of legitimated authority in practice is that it can shape what people think is in the their interests and that it can make what outsiders might find appalling seem to insiders to be normal and moral.
In response to these apparent puzzles, a third model of legitimation emphasizes the legitimating power of procedures. More than the substance of the decisions or the outcomes produced by the institutions, Tyler says that it is the procedures by which they are made that produce legitimacy. This approach to legitimation opens the possibility that people might still see as legitimate institutions that decide against their interests as long as the process is seen as basically fair or legal, or correct.
It is easy to identify attempts to create legitimacy but difficult to assess whether these efforts are successful. The first issue is easily seen when we analyze compliance. Compliance with rules is not evidence that the rules are seen as legitimate, and non compliance is not evidence against legitimacy.
There are many reasons that actors might comply with sources of authority, legitimacy being only one of them. It is an internal condition of belief whose existence is not directly observable. The second problem is that actors have an incentive to portray their rule as legitimate and challengers to that rule have an incentive to portray it as illegitimate. These incentives are inherent in the political value of legitimacy and they color every effort to empirically measure degrees of legitimacy.
Claims of legitimacy circulate around all political power, and counter-claims of illegitimacy are central to efforts to undermine that power. The strategies used to legitimize and delegitimize power vary greatly across circumstances. For instance, one might argue that the US tax code is legitimate on the grounds that it is administered fairly, or that it is has been approved by Congress, or that its revenue is used for the social good.
If the audience cares about fairness, legality, or good outcomes, these claims may be useful tools in a strategy of legitimation. Legitimacy and Self-Determination These strategies are evident in the practical politics of separatist insurgents against established nation-states. These movements often strive to legitimize their claims to self-determination and in this behavior we can see legitimation strategies in action.
Separatists address the international community with assorted arguments to justify being granted external recognition of their sovereignty. The values used in these justifications reflect both the nature of the separatist movements and the norms of the international community.
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