The meaning and measure of state legitimacy: Results for 72 countries

Abstract

Abstract. This article presents a quantitative measurement of the political legitimacy of states in the late 1990s and early 2000s for 72 states containing 5.1 billion people, or 83 per cent of the world's population. First, the concept of state legitimacy is defined and justified. The definition includes the subjects, objects and sub‐types of legitimacy. A strategy to achieve replicable cross‐national measurements of legitimacy is then outlined and implemented, including a discussion of data sources and three alternative aggregation methods. The results are briefly examined and tested, and the uncertainties of quantitative measures discussed. Finally, the role of supplementary qualitative measurement is considered.

Constitutionalizing Power: How Do Rules Legitimize the Executive?

“…We have however, surprisingly few attempts to quantify it, such that when one speaks of political legitimacy in one place, it can be easily and reliably compared to what we think of political legitimacy at another. Attempting to fill this gap, and complementing Gilley (2006), this paper develops an index of political legitimation, and more specifically of the legitimation of the executive branch. Here, legitimacy is conceived of as containing three parts -legitimation, delivery, and evaluation.…”

“…Despite the centrality that the concept of political legitimacy has in political science studies, there have been very few any attempts to quantify it and create a measurable statistic (Gilley 2006, 2012 is a notable exception). Gilley has pioneered in developing a quantitative measurement of political legitimacy, despite the pessimistic view of Easton (1965, cited in Gilley 2006 and King (1994, cited in Gilley 2006 about the prospects of the measurement of such an abstract concept.…”

Quantifying Political Legitimacy from Twitter

“…As such, in political science, many proposals have been made to quantify the legitimacy of a populace. Some recent works such as [1,2] have been well received in the community. While useful, however, such existing works are largely based on hand-picked small-size data from governments or UN based on an ad hoc formula.…”

“…The concept is often viewed as "central to virtually all of political science because it pertains to how power may be used in ways that citizens consciously accept" [1]. As such, in political science, many proposals have been made to quantify the legitimacy of a populace.…”

“…While useful, however, such existing works are largely based on hand-picked small-size data from governments or UN based on an ad hoc formula. Therefore, it is still challenging to renew or expand the results from [1,2] to other regions if there exist no reliable base data. To address this limitation, in this research, we ask a research question "if it is possible to quantify political legitimacy of a populace from social media data", especially using Twitter data.…”