Legitimacy in Areas of Limited Statehood

Abstract

Empirical legitimacy, defined as social acceptance of the right to rule, constitutes a key condition for effective governance in areas of limited statehood. Most work on legitimacy, however, is state centric and has exclusively focused on the state as the governance actor of interest. We argue that understanding the legitimacy of external and nonstate actors is essential for analyzing governance in areas of limited statehood. Moreover, subnational variations in legitimacy matter. While most studies of the legitimacy of governance actors have focused on the macroregional and national levels, a governance actor may enjoy high legitimacy in one part of a country but be considered illegitimate in other parts. Finally, the multiple sources and consequences of empirical legitimacy in areas of limited statehood have to be analyzed in greater depth. There is no single source of legitimacy, nor is there a single guaranteed consequence of legitimacy.

Operationalizing Legitimacy

“…Six of the reviews elaborate one or more substantively meaningful division in how legitimacy is conceptualized in existing research (Jackson 2018;Johnson, et al 2006;Risse and Stollenwerk 2018;Suchman 1995;Suddaby, et al 2017;Tyler 2006). For example, Risse and Stollenwerk (2018) distinguish between prescriptive approaches to legitimacy (common in political philosophy and law) which define what should be legitimate, versus analytic approaches (common in the social sciences) which examine how individuals and groups assess legitimacy.…”

“…In the face of multiple conceptualizations of legitimacy, a common approach to situating these differences is the delineation of types of legitimacy. Five of the eight reviews identify at least two distinct types of legitimacy (Jackson 2018;Johnson, et al 2006;Risse and Stollenwerk 2018;Suchman 1995;Suddaby, et al 2017), and collectively they identify 26 different types of legitimacy, all of which are presented in Table 2. Table 2 includes only types of legitimacy explicitly referenced in these review articles, and is not intended as an exhaustive list of all types of legitimacy that appear in the social sciences.…”

“…Research that adopts this approach typically equates legitimacy with other analytic constructs. For example, consistent with the literature they review, Risse and Stollenwerk (2018) use the terms legitimacy, trust, and support interchangeably. Similarly, Jackson (2018) details different approaches to measuring legitimacy using survey data on self-6 In identifying the types of legitimacy listed in Table 2, I only included those which were identified as a distinct type of legitimacy by the authors of the reviews, as indicated by references to "[X] legitimacy" (i.e., pragmatic legitimacy, moral legitimacy, and cognitive legitimacy; see Suchman 1995).…”

“…Over the past century, a multidisciplinary collection of scholarship has advanced important insights into both the causes and effects of legitimacy (Jackson 2018;Johnson, Dowd and Ridgeway 2006;Risse and Stollenwerk 2018;Suchman 1995), and much of this work traces its intellectual heritage to a common set of foundational texts (i.e., Weber 1978Weber [1921). Yet, despite the ubiquity of legitimacy and the presence of a common canon, there is little consensus surrounding how the construct should be operationalized.…”

“…Consequently, legitimacy has taken on multiple meanings. Lacking a clear empirical referent, legitimacy is assessed using divergent indicators, including (among other things) measures of acceptance, obedience, support, and compliance with rules or norms (Jackson 2018;Risse and Stollenwerk 2018;Suchman 1995). The implications of these indicators differ to the extent that distinct approaches to operationalization have had the unintended consequence of fostering disparate understandings of legitimacy's meaning, causes, and effects (Suddaby, Bitektine and Haack 2017).…”