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1. Legitimacy and legitimation
The legitimacy of a regime or an institution or a policy is what makes the involved
actors believe that it ought to be obeyed or implemented, even if they did not actually
participate in its making (they were members of neither the US Congress nor the
German Bundestag nor the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of China).
This is a first, clear-cut definition, based on the behaviour of those affected,
something that can be ascertained by empirical methods (voting, opinion polls). As
such, it has some advantages. On the other hand, since this behavioural definition
identifies legitimacy with consensus and regards it as matter-of-fact, it provides no
clues as to why people believe in legitimacy and how this belief came into being
and had the opportunity to evolve. The second definition opens up exactly these
aspects and can be called Weberian in acknowledgement of the scholar whose work
inspired it: legitimacy is here regarded as a resource to which political power can resort,
consisting in the chance to successfully activate meta-conventional and non-daily reasons that
provide a justification for power itself.
By resource, we mean something residing as a potential belief in the minds of
the citizens, which can be under certain conditions made explicit, thus leading
them to obey the authority’s commands. They will do so if these commands can
be credibly reconnected to ultimate sources or reasons or motives that go well
beyond our daily business: in pre-modern or early modern times it was God’s
will,
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the cosmic order of nature (a belief dismissed by Galilean-Newtonian phys-
ics) or the sanctity of tradition. The people’s will came later, in the wake of the
American and the French Revolutions, and is now the overwhelming source
of legitimacy, at least in rhetoric. What the paramount content of the people’s
will is varies across space and time: the protection of the rights to life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness (according to the US Declaration of Independence
of 1776), the establishment of virtue (Maximilien Robespierre in the French
Revolution), the abolition of class domination (Russian Revolution of 1917),
respecting and protecting the dignity of the human being (Grundgesetz/Basic Law
of the German Federal Republic, Art.1, 1949). Over long periods in history, the
decisive content or paramount value against which institutions and policies are
measured is subject to change: responsibility for future generations with regard
to climate change and control over lethal technologies, such as nuclear weapons,
may become in the decades ahead a leading parameter in assessing the legitimacy
of global governance.
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In this light, and more generally speaking, legitimacy appears as the conformity
of a regime or institution or policy to some (well-defined or fuzzy) model or ideal of
good governance the people have in mind, based as it is on one of those deep-lying
reasons (or a combination of some of them). This is not yet actual legitimation, but
it makes it possible if other, substantive conditions are satisfied.
Though we are not going to devise any typology of those models, we can-
not but recall Weber’s own, as developed in Chapter 3 (‘The Types of Legitimate
26 What is politics?
Domination’) of Economy and Society, Part 1.
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His typology has not yet been declared
obsolete after a hundred years, even if it looks nowadays insufficient, particularly
with regards to politics in the globalised world; besides, it refers to social power in
general, not specifically to the political one. It is based on the belief of legitimacy
and has three tiers:
•
in the traditional type, people believe the leadership to be legitimate due to its
roots in the sanctity of a long tradition,
•
in the rational power type, people believe in the legality of statute or case law
(scil. as different from natural law) and of the acts of the bureaucracy imple-
menting it, and
•
in that of charismatic power, the followers believe in the exceptional qualities
of a leader, be it a warlord or a party leader in a democracy.
These are ‘pure’ types, which rarely come up unmixed in the political reality, even
if in their combinations one type usually prevails. The combination of charismatic
and legal-bureaucratic aspects in leaders of democratic parties and governments,
which Weber originally described, has not lost its fascination in our times – in spite
of some inflationary use of ‘charismatic leader’ in the media.
Needless to say, in politics the second version of legitimacy, which I have
dubbed Weberian, has almost nothing to do with the legal declination of the
word (according to law, lawful). A further clarification: in old times, the legiti-
macy of a regime referred to the entitlement of the ruler to rule, while its legality
had to do with the effective way to exert power by respecting or breaking the
laws. Another example, in which both terms come up, is revolutionary power,
which can be legitimate though lawless in the sense of the former regime. More
importantly, political legitimacy is also different from consensus and cannot be
gauged by votes or opinion polls. Were legitimacy and consensus merged, there
would be conceptual tools left neither for the understanding of change in legiti-
macy patterns, due to new challenges or new alternatives; nor for the deficit of
legitimacy that can stay hidden in electoral consensus, because voters see no
viable alternative or, especially in authoritarian regimes, fear reprisals in the event
that they act against the sitting leadership. Plebiscitary and authoritarian democ-
racy, which in its best days had a lot of consensus, would result to be the best
form of democracy. These are all considerations that justify keeping our notion
of legitimacy on two levels, behavioural and deep-sitting or Weberian. In order
to better understand these ambiguous situations, we now turn to explaining the
notion of legitimation.
We understand legitimacy as a resource, in other words as a chance that, thanks
to its constitutive characteristics, a political regime can be recognised by citizens
as corresponding to their models of good governance. This chance is realised, if
ever, in a process called legitimation: not a once-for-all event, but a process winding
through the daily and yearly vicissitudes of the polity. This is a process in which the
regime does not simply confirm its claim to correspond to principles and ideals,
The subjective side of politics 27
but also proves itself capable of providing the ruled with substantive goods or basic
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