Political legitimacy
In political systems where this is not the case, unpopular regimes survive because they are considered legitimate by a small, influential elite.
The three types of political legitimacy described by German sociologist Max Weber, in "Politics as Vocation", are traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal: More recent scholarship distinguishes between multiple other types of legitimacy in an effort to draw distinctions between various approaches to the construct.
The political legitimacy of a civil government derives from agreement among the autonomous constituent institutions—legislative, judicial, executive—combined for the national common good.
[19] Another challenge to the political legitimacy offered by elections is whether or not marginalized groups such as women or those who are incarcerated are allowed to vote.
[22] The organization also publishes case studies that consider the theme of legitimacy as it applies to projects in a number of different countries and cities including Bristol, Lebanon and Canada.
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.
But policies that aim at (re-)constructing legitimacy by improving the service delivery or 'output' of a state often only respond to shared needs.
Other authorities, such as armed groups in a conflict zones, may construct legitimacy more successfully than the state in certain strata of the population.
[31] Political theorist Ross Mittiga has proposed an alternative typology, consisting of two parts: foundational and contingent legitimacy.
Mittiga specifies further that FL:...is bound up with a range of political capacities and actions including, among other things, being able to ensure continuous access to essential goods (particularly food, water, and shelter), prevent avoidable catastrophes, provide immediate and effective disaster relief, and combat invading forces or quell unjustified uprisings or rebellions.
[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 commonly defended factors" are "the presence of democratic rights and processes, consent, guarantees of equal representation, provision of core public benefits, protection of basic individual rights and freedoms, social justice, and observance of fairness principles."
4–5] Mittiga specifies further that "[m]ost contemporary theorists maintain that legitimacy [in the contingent sense] requires multiple of these factors—some of which are procedural and others substantive.
"[32] According to Mittiga, what makes 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 factor(s) matters (or matter most of all) "will remain 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 seemingly stable CL factors are routinely relaxed or abandoned during emergencies, often without calling into question the basic legitimacy of the government.
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]Max Weber proposed that societies behave cyclically in governing themselves with different types of governmental legitimacy.
That traditional authority has disappeared in the Middle East; that the rule-proving exceptions are Islamic Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Establishing what qualifies as a legitimate form of government continues to be a topic of great philosophical controversy.
