Social services to claim legitimacy: comparing autocracies’ performance

ABSTRACT

Autocrats cannot rule by repression and co-optation alone, and need to instil some sense of legitimacy in the populace. Lacking democratic legitimacy, and being in shortage of other identity-based sources of diffuse support, legitimation claims in post-Cold War autocracies increasingly rests on rulers’ ability to achieve concrete outcomes, including the improvement of citizen living conditions. However, autocracies differ from each other, and different institutional arrangements could influence a leader’s ability to deliver social services, and chase performance-based legitimation. Accordingly, this article compares the social service performance of different post-Cold War authoritarian regimes. The analysis demonstrates that so-called electoral autocracies outperform single-party and military regimes, although they show a capacity to provide for their citizens that is similar to hereditary regimes. These findings suggest that the legitimacy returns of introducing semi-competitive and participatory institutions could grow exponentially. Besides procedural legitimacy, these institutions could help rulers pursue legitimation through social services.     

For Whose Benefit? Fear and Loathing in the Welfare State

This article contributes to the debate on the relationship between marketing and propaganda through an analysis of social marketing as a mode of governing in permanent campaigning. The working hypothesis is that social marketing operations are agitational rather than propagandistic. The conceptual approach stems from a comparison of propaganda and marketing with Fordist and post-Fordist modes of production and governance. The research into the role of agitation involves an empirical study of the UK government campaign against benefit fraud, the most expensive of its kind. Using a combination of methodologies, the political context is framed through a discourse analysis that charts the historical emergence of the problem of benefit fraud and the material effects of this discourse on welfare spending allocation, content analysis is used to identify correspondences between different newspapers’ rhetoric and policy under different governments, and semiotic analysis helps to decode the message of the campaign against benefit fraud, as it relates to the overall government's strategy on this issue. The study offers insights into the political strategy of the government of New Labour between 1997 and 2010 and its resort to agitational techniques, exposing the limitations of government marketing and public relations in the context of an overall crisis of its political legitimacy, in both economic and political terms.     

诉讼掮客问题刍议

诉讼掮客是指在法官和当事人之间搞活动、拉关系的人,主要包括单打独斗、“垂帘听政”、“包二爷”和联营等类型,行政机关和公、检、法等司法机关的离职及在职人员等是其主要来源。诉讼掮客的存在原因比较复杂,对法律服务市场、法制建设和社会稳定产生了较大的危害性。因而有必要针对诉讼掮客问题,提出若干具体解决措施并完善代理、辩护等制度,设立“关系律师”媒体公开制度和法律共同体依法执业制度。     

The quest for regional legitimation: Analyzing the Arab League’s legitimizing role in the Arab spring

The topic of international legitimacy has returned to centre stage during the Arab Spring, in which the Arab League has apparently assumed a prominent legitimation role. Although some scholarship has studied how international organizations are decisive in legitimizing actors and their actions during conflicts, relatively scant attention has been focused at constructing a comprehensive analytical framework for this kind of assessment that could be also applied to regional organizations (ROs). This paper proposes that when actors are involved in battles over international legitimation, analysing their access to the socially identified brokers of three legitimation functions (appropriateness, consensus, and empathy) is key to assess their success. Particularly, we argue that relevant identity-based ROs may have a crucial legitimizing role by operating as brokers of regional consensus. For this purpose, two case studies – Bahrain and Libya – illustrate how the Arab League’s brokerage influenced the legitimation of the actors involved and their outcomes. The findings suggest novel implications about the decisive legitimizing impact of regionalism on conflict resolution.