Legitimacy and institutional purpose

ABSTRACT

Institutions undertake a huge variety of constitutive purposes. One of the roles of legitimacy is to protect and promote an institution’s pursuit of its purpose; state legitimacy is generally understood as the right to rule, for example. When considering legitimacy beyond the state, we have to take account of how differences in purposes change legitimacy. I focus in particular on how differences in purpose matter for the stringency of the standards that an institution must meet in order to be legitimate. An important characteristic of an institution’s purpose is its deontic status, i.e. whether it is morally impermissible, merely permissible, or mandatory. Although this matters, it does so in some non-obvious ways; the mere fact of a morally impermissible purpose is not necessarily delegitimating, for example. I also consider the problem of conflicting, multiple, and contested institutional purposes, and the different theoretical roles for institutional purpose. Understanding how differences in purpose matter for an institution’s legitimacy is one part of the broader project of theorizing institutional legitimacy in the many contexts beyond the traditional context of the state.     

Nurturing regulatory compliance: Is procedural justice effective when people question the legitimacy of the law?

Procedural justice generally enhances an authority's legitimacy and encourages people to comply with an authority's decisions and rules. We argue, however, that previous research on procedural justice and legitimacy has examined legitimacy in a limited way by focusing solely on the perceived legitimacy of authorities and ignoring how people may perceive the legitimacy of the laws and rules they enforce. In addition, no research to date has examined how such perceptions of legitimacy may moderate the effect of procedural justice on compliance behavior. Using survey data collected across three different regulatory contexts – taxation (Study 1), social security (Study 2), and law enforcement (Study 3) – the findings suggest that one's perceptions of the legitimacy of the law moderates the effect of procedural justice on compliance behaviors; procedural justice is more important for shaping compliance behaviors when people question the legitimacy of the laws than when they accept them as legitimate. An explanation of these findings using a social distancing framework is offered, along with a discussion of the implications the findings have on enforcement.     

Legitimacy Deficit: Chinese Leadership at the United Nations

This paper examines the likelihood of China’s legitimation as the global hegemon during an era of relative U.S. decline. Using Rapkin’s (1990) legitimacy deficit framework, the author tests China’s prospects for international legitimacy through the analysis of Chinese leadership at the United Nations (UN). While China’s recent exponential increase in contributions to UN peacekeeping and the UN regular budget signal growing Chinese global leadership, their consistent focus on regional interests, as displayed in UN Security Council and UN General Assembly debate and discussion, indicates the absence of an internationally supported agenda. In concluding, this paper asserts that recent Chinese legitimation efforts through UN leadership have been stonewalled by an inability to provide an international agenda with globally held values and beliefs.     

UN Peace Operations and Conflicting Legitimacies

ABSTRACT

Analyses of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping increasingly consider legitimacy a key factor for success, conceiving of it as a resource that operations should seek and use in the pursuit of their goals. However, these analyses rarely break down legitimacy by source. Because the UN is an organization with multiple identities and duties however, different legitimacy sources – in particular output and procedural legitimacy – and the UN’s corresponding legitimation practices come into conflict in the context of peacekeeping. Drawing on a range of examples and the specific case of the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), this article argues that looking at different legitimacy sources and linking them to the institutional identity of the UN is thus critical, and it shows how the UN’s contradictory legitimation practices can reduce overall legitimacy perceptions.     

Control,consent and political legitimacy

In this essay, I evaluate Philip Pettit’s theory of republican political legitimacy and maintain that it fails to provide a more satisfactory account of legitimacy than consent-based theories. I advance two interrelated theses. First, I argue that in so far as Pettit successfully narrows the scope that his theory of political legitimacy has to address, his arguments could be adapted to support consent-based theories. Second, I argue that Pettit’s theory fails to satisfy the high standards it sets for itself and is thus unsuccessful. My critique focuses on Pettit’s notions of historical, political and normative necessity, before evaluating whether his requirement of equally individualised popular control of government should be endorsed.     

The European Commission: The Limits of Centralization and the Perils of Parliamentarization

The idea of an inevitable process of centralization in the European Community (EC)/European Union (EU) is a myth. Also, the metaphor of “creeping competences,” with its suggestion of a surreptitious but continuous growth of the powers of the Commission, can be misleading. It is true that the functional scope of EC/EU competences has steadily increased, but the nature of new competences has changed dramatically, as may be seen from the evolution of the methods of harmonization. The original emphasis on total harmonization, which gives the Community exclusive competence over a given policy area, has been largely replaced by more flexible but less “communitarian” methods such as optional and minimum harmonization, reference to nonbinding technical standards, and mutual recognition. Finally, the treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam explicitly excluded harmonization for most new competences. Thus, the expansion of the jurisdiction of the EC/EU has not automatically increased the powers of the Commission, but has actually weakened them in several respects. In addition, the progressive parliamentarization of the Commission risks compromising its credibility as an independent regulator, without necessarily enhancing its democratic legitimacy. Since the member states continue to oppose any centralization of regulatory powers, even in areas essential to the functioning of the internal market, the task of implementing Community policies should be entrusted to networks of independent national and European regulators, roughly modeled on the European System of Central Banks. The Commission would coordinate and monitor the activities of these networks in order to ensure the coherence of EC regulatory policies. More generally, it should bring its distinctive competence more clearly into focus by concentrating on the core business of ensuring the development and proper functioning of the single European market. This is a more modest role than that of the kernel of a future government of Europe, but it is essential to the credibility of the integration process and does not overstrain the limited financial and legitimacy resources available to the Commission.     

Legitimacy beyond the state: institutional purposes and contextual constraints

ABSTRACT

The essays collected in this special issue explore what legitimacy means for actors and institutions that do not function like traditional states but nevertheless wield significant power in the global realm. They are connected by the idea that the specific purposes of non-state actors and the contexts in which they operate shape what it means for them to be legitimate and so shape the standards of justification that they have to meet. In this introduction, we develop this guiding methodology further and show how the special issue’s individual contributions apply it to their cases. In the first section, we provide a sketch of our purpose-dependent theory of legitimacy beyond the state. We then highlight two features of the institutional context beyond the state that set it apart from the domestic case: problems of feasibility and the structure of international law.     

Legitimacy,self-determination,and conditional cooperators

ABSTRACT

This article critically examines the account of collective self-determination and state legitimacy developed by Stilz in her book. Central to this account is the idea that for a state to be legitimate it must reflect the shared will of the people over which it governs. I argue that the normative taxonomy Stilz employs to develop this criterion of legitimacy ignores the possibility of conditional cooperators: groups who are alienated from society due to the injustices they experience but are willing to affirm their participation in state institutions if these injustices are rectified. I then demonstrate that since there are no grounds for discounting the dissent of conditional cooperators, their presence significantly increases the threshold for state legitimacy that follows from Stilz’s theory. As a result, Stilz is forced to abandon her claim that basically just states generally enjoy a qualified ‘right to do wrong’.     

Afraid of a ‘Kosovo Scenario’: A Disquieting Precedent for International Conflict Management

The UN Security Council Resolution 1244 (1999) represented an interim settlement that permitted conflict de-escalation while postponing the search for a lasting political solution. The final settlement should have been reached through negotiations between Belgrade and the Kosovo Albanians, and then endorsed by the UN Security Council, in accordance with the UN Resolution 1244 (1999). However, citing the ambiguity of the interim agreement and a deadlock in the negotiations, the United States and its allies recognized Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence in February 2008, thereby allowing the Kosovo Albanians to defect from the peace process. Therefore, instead of an internationally endorsed negotiated outcome, there has been an attempt at a unilaterally enforced political settlement, in disregard for the authority of the UN Security Council, which had placed Kosovo under international administration. The subsequent involvement of the International Court of Justice has failed to resolve the contentious issues between Belgrade and Prishtina or bridge the international divide over Kosovo. Besides creating a troublesome legal precedent, the recognition of Kosovo represents a bad model for international conflict management. The issues of concern are the viability of future interim settlements, good faith negotiations and the legitimacy and guarantees provided by the international involvement, including the authority of the UN Security Council. Some parallels are drawn between Kosovo and other territorial disputes, particularly in the Caucasus, indicating how the Kosovo case could influence other conflicts.     

The Enlargement of the UN Security Council: Reflections from the Current Debate

In this article an attempt is made to take stock of recent developments (1997–2000) regarding the ongoing debate on the UN Security Council enlargement. The comprehensive plan for reform, known as the 'Razali Plan', its repercussions on the debate as well as the attitude of the membership of the UN are among the issues discussed here. We argue that the only realistic proposition for the time being is an expansion of the non-permanent membership of the Security Council, which could give some impetus to the process of comprehensive reform.     

The Place of Sovereignty

Abstract

This article addresses the relationship between sovereignty, biopolitics and governmentality in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault. By unpacking Foucault’s genealogy of modern governmentality, it responds to a criticism leveled against Foucauldian accounts of power for their alleged abandonment of the traditional model of power in juridico-institutional terms in favor of an understanding of power as purely productive. This claim has most significantly been developed by Agamben in “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life”. I argue that Judith Butler’s analysis of power, in particular in her essay “Indefinite Detention”, presents a more differentiated account of power that registers the significance of practices of sovereignty and resonates with Foucault’s lectures on “Security, Territory, Population”.     

Majority representation and legitimacy: Survey-experimental evidence from the European Union

What can policy makers do in day-to-day decision making to strengthen citizens' belief that the political system is legitimate? Much literature has highlighted that the realization of citizens' personal preferences in policy making is an important driver of legitimacy beliefs. We argue that citizens, in addition, also care about whether a policy represents the preferences of the majority of citizens, even if their personal preference diverges from the majority's. Using the case of the European Union (EU) as a system that has recurringly experienced crises of public legitimacy, we conduct a vignette survey experiment in which respondents assess the legitimacy of fictitious EU decisions that vary in how they were taken and whose preferences they represent. Results from original surveys conducted in the five largest EU countries show that the congruence of EU decisions not only with personal opinion but also with different forms of majority opinion significantly strengthens legitimacy beliefs. We also show that the most likely mechanism behind this finding is the application of a ‘consensus heuristic’, by which respondents use majority opinion as a cue to identify legitimate decisions. In contrast, procedural features such as the consultation of interest groups or the inclusiveness of decision making in the institutions have little effect on legitimacy beliefs. These findings suggest that policy makers can address legitimacy deficits by strengthening majority representation, which will have both egotropic and sociotropic effects.     

Contestation and co-optation: why secrecy in EU external relations varies

Abstract

The question posed in this article is how to explain that the governance of secrecy in EU external relations varies. While the Common Foreign and Security Policy appears to retain its secretive character, the EU’s external trade policy has recently seen a shift towards more transparency. This article argues that to understand this variation, one has to take into account the institutional power of the European Parliament as well as the extent to which the rules and practices of secrecy are perceived as legitimate. The empowerment of the Parliament in trade means that it has had recent success in pushing back secrecy in this area. However, a general finding is that the majority of parliamentarians seem only rarely to question the executive’s governance of secrecy in external relations. The analysis shows that perceptions of legitimacy are crucial to account for different secrecy regimes – a finding that is likely to be relevant for the understanding of secrecy in foreign policy beyond the EU.     

Conceptualizing the Relationship Between Persuasion and Legitimacy: Official Framing in the Case of the Chinese Communist Party

In the debate on authoritarian resilience, the importance of persuasion to regime legitimacy has been widely acknowledged, yet a conceptual framework explaining the role of persuasion is still lacking. Against this backdrop, we argue that the framing perspective (Benford and Snow 1988) provides a useful basis for such a framework. Drawing on Beetham’s (1991) legitimacy model, we contend that the ruling elites in authoritarian regimes propagate official frames in a continuous effort to reproduce the belief of the populace in the elites’ leadership qualities and their determination to serve the common interest. In the empirical part of our paper we look at the case of China, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has in recent years reemphasized persuasion as a means of reproducing legitimacy. We then apply our theory in an analysis of the conceptual shifts in the CCP’s frames and ideology, as propagated under its secretary general, Hu Jintao.     

Canadian multilateral intergovernmental institutions and the limits of institutional innovation

ABSTRACT

In 2003, the premiers of Canada’s ten provinces and three territories established the Council of the Federation (CoF) to strengthen interprovincial cooperation and exercise leadership on national issues. However, the purpose of COF in practice has not been the subject of systematic study. Against the backdrop of its predecessor, the Annual Premiers’ Conference, and the broader institutional and economic forces that contribute more generally to weak institutionalization of Canada’s multilateral intergovernmental forums, this paper considers the functioning of CoF in practice by analysing the nature of the joint positions of premiers expressed in communiqués it has issued to the end of Conservative government rule, 2015. This analysis reveals the spectrum of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ measures that CoF has undertaken, and the nature of integration of CoF with other multilateral intergovernmental forums. It concludes that CoF is not immune to the underlying forces contributing more generally to the weak institutionalization of multilateral intergovernmental councils.     

Three cheers for liberal modesty

ABSTRACT

Many liberals have been immodest in postulating that their own progressive, secular liberalism is the only one that can be justified in public reason. In Liberalism’s Religion, I articulate a more modest theory of liberalism and religion. While I personally endorse progressive secular liberalism, I argue that it is only one of the reasonable conceptions of liberal justice. This liberal modesty has profound, hitherto unnoticed implications for (i) the role of religious arguments in the public sphere, (ii) the legitimacy of religious establishment, and (iii) the justifiability of religious exemptions. In this article, I defend these three claims by providing replies to my critics.     

Book Reviews

Four years after its formal establishment, the European External Action Service (EEAS) remains in a state of complex and overlapping areas of competence. There are interlocking layers of political and administrative governance, where the service has to interact with, and answer to, different national and intergovernmental political masters as well as supranational actors, notably the European Commission and the European Parliament. The formal political decision-making power with regard to the EU’s common foreign and security policy lies with the Council, whilst substantial competences, notably in the field of the European Neighbourhood (ENP) and trade policies, as well as development and cooperation, remain under the control of the European Commission. The EEAS’s autonomy and institutional orientation are both much debated and empirically unexplored. Based on quantitative and qualitative data, this article undertakes a behavioural analysis of EEAS decision-making. Empirical findings suggest that there are competing institutional logics at work among different groups of staff which affect their respective administrative decisional behaviour. Supranational recruits tend to be more community-minded, whereas officials with an intergovernmental background have a propensity to be more member state oriented.     

Legitimacy and Coercion in Peacebuilding: A Balancing Act

ABSTRACT

Despite the tendency of the power literature to analyse legitimacy and coercion in isolation, both theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that coercion and legitimacy are not parallel lines but can interact in different ways, supporting or undermining each other. A methodical exploration of the relationship between legitimacy and coercion is important not only for improving the theoretical literatures on power and legitimacy but also in the light of the increasing interest in the power of legitimacy in statebuilding and peacebuilding. This article first analyses the overall interaction between coercion and legitimacy, and then explores the question that emerges from the interaction analysis; what level of coercion is permitted or required in order for a mission’s local legitimacy to be sustained? Finally, for the practice of peacebuilding, the article shows that an operation needs to understand its initial legitimacy standing with the local population, as this determines how much coercive force it can employ without undermining its overall legitimacy.     

Why we should not believe every lesson Andrew Moravcsik teaches us: A response

This article is a response to Andrew Moravcsik’s “What Can We Learn from the Collapse of the European Constitutional Project?”, published in No. 2, Vol. 47 (2006) of the PVS. In our reply we focus on three main points. First, we argue that Moravcsik’s apologia of the status quo does not convince in light of the challenges that a European Union currently with 27 member states and increasing heterogeneity is facing. Second, we discuss his causal chain model linking participation, deliberation and political legitimacy. We argue that Moravcsik confuses causality with conditionality. By doing so, he exaggerates claims of normative political science about the causal relationship between participation, deliberation and legitimacy, and makes it an unjustifiably easy target for critique. Third, we critically examine Moravcsik’s notion of democracy in order to show that his view of democracy as guaranteeing “certain social goods” brings about the risk of producing a theory of democracy without democracy.     

Exploring Transnational Civil Society: A Comparative Study of Colombian,Dominican and Mexican Immigrant Organizations in the USA

ABSTRACT

European integration has added an extra dimension to the perceived crisis of contemporary democracy. Many observers argue that the allocation of decision-making powers beyond the nation state bears the risk of hollowing out the institutional mechanisms of democratic accountability. In EU governance, the Commission has emerged as a particularly active and imaginative actor promoting EU–society relations, and it has done so with the explicit desire to improve the democratic legitimacy of the EU. However, assumptions concerning the societal prerequisites of a working democracy differ with the normative theory of democracy employed. Therefore, expectations concerning the beneficial effect of institutional reforms such as the European Commission's new governance strategy, which was launched at the beginning of the century, vary according to normative standards set by different theories of democracy on the one hand and to the confidence in the malleability of society on the other. Our contribution seeks to pave a way for the systematic assessment of the democratic potential of the European Commission's consultation regime. To this purpose, two alternative theoretical conceptions that link participation to democracy will be presented. A list of criteria for both conceptions that enable us to empirically assess the democratic potential of the EU Commission's participatory strategy will then be presented.