Conceptualizing Politics

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 

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26  What is politics?
Domination’) of Economy and Society, Part 1.
3
 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, 

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The subjective side of politics  27
but also proves itself capable of providing the ruled with substantive goods or basic