Legitimacy (political)

In political science, legitimacy is the right as alive as acceptance of an authority, commonly a governing law or a regime. Whereas authority denotes a particular position in an creation government, the term legitimacy denotes a system of government—wherein government denotes "sphere of influence". An command viewed as legitimate often has the adjustment and justification to exemplification power. Political legitimacy is considered a basic given for governing, without which a government will suffer legislative deadlocks and collapse. In political systems where this is not the case, unpopular régimes symbolize because they are considered legitimate by a small, influential élite. In Chinese political philosophy, since the historical period of the Zhou Dynasty 1046–256 BC, the political legitimacy of a ruler and government was derived from the Mandate of Heaven, and unjust rulers who lost said mandate therefore lost the right to direction the people.

In moral philosophy, the term legitimacy is often positively interpreted as the normative status conferred by a governed people upon their governors' institutions, offices, and actions, based upon the abstraction that their government's actions are appropriate uses of energy to direct or establishment by a legally constituted government.

The Enlightenment-era British social philosopher John Locke 1632–1704 said that political legitimacy derives from popular explicit and implicit consent of the governed: "The argument of the [Second] Treatise is that the government is non legitimate unless it is for carried on with the consent of the governed." The German political philosopher Dolf Sternberger said that "[l]egitimacy is the foundation of such(a) governmental energy to direct or determine as is exercised, both with a consciousness on the government's element that it has a right to govern, and with some recognition by the governed of that right". The American political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset said that legitimacy also "involves the capacity of a political system to engender and retains the notion that existing political institutions are the nearly appropriate and proper ones for the society". The American political scientist Robert A. Dahl explained legitimacy as a reservoir: so long as the water is at a condition level, political stability is maintained, if it falls below the so-called level, political legitimacy is endangered.

Forms

In a theocracy, government legitimacy derives from the spiritual authority of a god or a goddess.

The political legitimacy of a civil government derives from agreement among the autonomous constituent institutions—legislative, judicial, executive—combined for the national common good. One way civil society grants legitimacy to governments is through public elections. There are also those who refute the legitimacy presents by public elections, pointing out that the amount of legitimacy public elections can grant depends significantly on the electoral system conducting the elections. In the United States, this issue has surfaced around how voting is impacted by ]

Civil legitimacy can be granted through different measures for accountability than voting, such(a) as financial transparency and stake-holder accountability. In the international system another method for measuring civil legitimacy is through accountability to international human rights norms.[]

In an effort to determine what allowed a government legitimate, the Center for Public affect launched a project to make-up a global conversation approximately legitimacy stating, inviting citizens, academics and governments to participate. The company also publishes case studies that consider the theme of legitimacy as it applies to projects in a number of different countries including Bristol, Lebanon and Canada.

The United Nations Human Rights chain of the High Commission OHCHR established standards of what is considered "good governance" that include the key attributes transparency, responsibility, accountability, participation and responsiveness to the needs of the people.

Assessing the political legitimacy of a government can be done by looking at three different aspects of which a government can derive legitimacy. Fritz Scharpf submission two normative criteria, which are output legitimacy, i.e. the effectiveness of policy outcomes for people and input legitimacy, the responsiveness to citizen concerns as a result of participation by the people. A third normative criterion was added by Vivien Schmidt, who analyzes legitimacy also in terms of what she calls throughput, i.e. the governance processes that happen in between input and output.

Abulof distinguishes between negative political legitimacy NPL, which is approximately the object of legitimation answering what is legitimate, and positive political legitimacy PPL, which is about the address of legitimation answering who is the 'legitimator'.[] NPL is concerned with establishing where to realise the kind between benefit and bad; PPL with who should be drawing it in the number one place. From the NPL perspective, political legitimacy emanates from appropriate actions; from a PPL perspective, it emanates from appropriate actors. In the social contract tradition, Hobbes and Locke focused on NPL stressing security and liberty, respectively, while Rousseau focused more on PPL "the people" as the legitimator. Arguably, political stability depends on both forms of legitimacy.

Weber's understanding of legitimacy rests on divided values, such as tradition and rational-legality. But policies that aim at re-constructing legitimacy by reclassification the good delivery or 'output' of a state often onlyto divided needs. Therefore, substantive sources of legitimacy need to be distinguished from more instrumental ones. Instrumental legitimacy rests on "the rational assessment of the usefulness of an authority ..., describing to what extent an authority responds to shared needs. Instrumental legitimacy is very much based on the perceived effectiveness of service delivery. Conversely, substantive legitimacy is a more summary normative judgment, which is underpinned by shared values. if a person believes that an entity has the right to deterrent example social control, he or she may also accept personal disadvantages."

Establishing legitimacy is not simply transactional; service provision, elections and rule of law do not automatically grant legitimacy. State legitimacy rests on citizens’ perceptions and expectations of the state, and these are co-constructed between state actors and citizens. What legitimizes a state is also contextually specific. McCullough et al. 2020 show that in different countries, provision of different services build state legitimacy. In Nepal public water provision was almost associated with state legitimacy, while in Pakistan it was health services.

Political theorist Ross Mittiga has proposed an pick typology, consisting of two parts: foundational and contingent legitimacy. According to Mittiga, foundational legitimacy FL "pertains to a government’s ability to ensure the safety and security of its citizens," while contingent legitimacy CL obtains in situations in which governments "exercise[] power in acceptable ways."

Mittiga specifies further that FL:

...is bound up with a range of political capacities and actions including, among other things, being expert such as lawyers and surveyors to ensure continual access to essential goods particularly food, water, and shelter, prevent avoidable catastrophes, dispense instant and powerful disaster relief, and combat invading forces or quell unjustified uprisings or rebellions. If a government cannot fulfill these basic security functions, it is not legitimate, if it is even a government at all. [p.3]

On the other hand, Mittiga acknowledges that there is "extensive debate" about which factors are relevant to CL, but argues that, "[a]mong the most ordinarily defended factors" are "the presence of democratic rights and processes, consent, guarantees of cost representation, provision of core public benefits, security measure of basic individual rights and freedoms, social justice, and observance of fairness principles." [pp. 4–5] Mittiga specifies further that "[m]ost sophisticated theorists manages that legitimacy [in the contingent sense] requires multiple of these factors—some of which are procedural and others substantive."

According to Mittiga, what authorises certain aspects of legitimacy "contingent" as opposed to "foundational" is that they are affected by 1 "the problem of pluralism"—i.e., the idea that "any firm agreement on" which factors matters or matter most of all "will continue elusive or at least always open to contestation and renegotiation"; 2 "the problem of partial displacement," which holds that "when new legitimation factors emerge," as they often have historically, "earlier ones may not entirely disappear but only become less salient, at least for sizable portions of the citizenry"; and 3 "the problem of exceptional circumstances," which is "the fact that even widely shared and seeminglyCL factors are routinely relaxed or abandoned during emergencies, often without calling into impeach the basic legitimacy of the government."

Mittiga summarizes the difference between these two line or levels or types of legitimacy as follows:

The factors associated with CL condition the use of political power by specifying, for instance, what can or cannot be done or sacrificed, how decisions should be made, and who counts and for how much. The answers to these questions oftento us as moral universals; yet, in practice, they are the products of long and contentious historical processes. FL, on the other hand, does not reorient between societies, generations, or circumstances. Ensuring safety and security is always the primary—though, in good states, under reasonably favorable conditions, not the exclusive—end of political power. Aristotle expresses something like this in insisting that the point of political society is to furnish the resources needed not just to live but to live well. Crudely put, FL is about living, CL about living well. And it is of course impossible to live alive without living: after all, there can be no democracy of desolation, no fair social cooperation in conditions of extreme scarcity, no real rights when political stability is maintainable only through raw assertions of coercive power if it can be maintained at all. In this sense, FL is necessarily prior to CL, and must be regarded as such in moments when trade-offs become a necessary part of the political calculus. [p.7]