2

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
revisiting legitimacy,
twenty years on
David Beetham

It may seem self-indulgent of me to revisit a book I wrote more than 20 years ago
(Beetham 1991). However, there are a number of reasons for doing so which go
beyond self-indulgence. One is that many of its ideas have been taken up and devel-
oped by others, and this is an appropriate moment for me to respond to these devel-
opments, as well as to correct a few misunderstandings. These developments have
occurred not only within the analysis of state legitimacy, which was the subject of
the second half of my book, but also in fields beyond it, such as criminal justice and
international institutions; and it will be useful to explore the implications of these
analyses for political science more narrowly conceived. In the first part of this chap-
ter, then, I will outline what I see as distinctive about my method of analysing legiti-
macy. Then I go on to summarize some key developments in legitimacy analysis in
the fields of criminal justice, political science and the study of international institu-
tions respectively, and explore their implications for my own analytical framework.
Finally, I will test the usefulness of this framework against what is arguably the most
significant legitimacy crisis of recent years, that of the international financial sector,
and how that crisis has come to be displaced onto the democratic states of Europe
and the European Union itself.

The Discursive Structure of Legitimacy

The starting point of my analysis is to insist on the ambiguity of the term ‘legitimacy’,
and how it means different things to the political philosopher and the social scientist.
Legitimate power for the philosopher is power which is rightful according to ration-
ally defensible standards or principles. Legitimate power for the social scientist
is power which is acknowledged as rightful by relevant agents, who include power-
holders and their staff, those subject to the power and third parties whose support or
recognition may help confirm it. This distinction between power which is rightful and
power which is acknowledged as rightful is a crucial one, and marks a difference
between the reasoned justifications of the political philosopher and the empirical

Legitimacy and Criminal Justice. Justice Tankebe and Alison Liebling.

© Oxford University Press 2013. Published 2013 by Oxford University Press.
20 political science perspectives on legitimacy and justice

analyses of the social scientist. However, it does not follow from this distinction that
legitimacy for the social scientist can simply be reduced to a subjective belief in legiti-
macy, as if this were independent of the grounds on which the claim to legitimacy is
based, and of what gives them credibility in a given social and ideational context. Here

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
lies the first distinctive feature of my legitimacy analysis: I argue that the empirical
study of legitimacy involves a discursive investigation of the grounds or criteria on
which a claim to legitimacy is based, and of the credibility of those grounds to relevant
agents in a given social and historical context. As the authors of a forthcoming article
referring to my work write: ‘Drawing on Beetham we argue that . . . social science anal-
yses of legitimacy must uncover the “normative expectations” of actors embedded in
a social context, and how these actors assess whether their expectations are in fact
met’ (Cah et al., forthcoming).
If the discursive analysis of legitimacy claims and their credibility to relevant agents
in a given social context forms the starting point of my approach, its second distinctive
feature is the claim that all legitimacy everywhere conforms to a common threefold
discursive structure, comprising rule conformity, normative justifiability, and expressed
affirmation or recognition. As I put it, power is acknowledged as legitimate to the
extent that:
(1) It is acquired and exercised according to established rules (legality);
(2) The rules of power and its exercise conform to accepted beliefs about the rightful
source of authority and the proper ends or purposes of power and standards in its
exercise (normative justifiability);
(3) Positions of power and their holders are acknowledged through actions by relevant
subordinates which confirm their acceptance or recognition of it (legitimation).
These three levels are not alternatives, since all contribute to legitimacy; together
they provide the subordinate with moral grounds for compliance or cooperation
with authority. That all are required can be shown by the different negative words
we use to express the different ways in which power may lack legitimacy. If there is
a manifest breach of the rules, we use the term ‘illegitimacy’. If the appropriate
normative beliefs lack social anchoring or are not realised in practice, we talk of a
‘legitimacy deficit’. If recognition is publicly withdrawn or withheld, we speak of
‘delegitimation’.
This threefold framework is a heuristic tool to guide analysis of any particular
structure or system of legitimate power, which will have its distinctive form of rules or
law, distinctive societal beliefs about the rightful source of authority and purposes of
power, and distinctive institutional means for binding in key subordinates through
public acts of affirmation or recognition. These distinctions can be usefully illustrated
in a comparative table of the major regime types of the twentieth century, set out in
Table 2.1. These serve as ideal-types in the Weberian sense, and combinations and
variations of each are possible. Each also has its distinctive points of weakness or
crisis tendency, which have mostly proved terminal, with the exception of liberal-
democracy, though deformations of the latter in an authoritarian direction are
well known. Reasons for the survivability of the liberal-democratic type will not be
pursued here (see Beetham 2011).
Table 2.1 Legitimating components of different twentieth-century regime types

Regime type Form of law Source of authority Ends of government Mode of public
affirmation

Traditional Custom/precedent Heredity/the past Well-being within traditional Assembly of social elite
order
Fascist Sovereign decisionism Leadership principle National purity/expansion Mass mobilization
Communist Codification of collective Party monopoly of truth and Building the communist Mass mobilization
will representation future
Liberal-democratic Constitutional rule of law The people through competitive Individual rights protection Electoral endorsement
election and advancement
Theocratic Sacred texts and canons Divine will interpreted by the Purifying society’s moral Various of the above
hierarchy order
Dictatorial Decree Self-authorization Restore order and national None
unity

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
22 political science perspectives on legitimacy and justice

The course of regime breakdown follows a typical pattern whereby a legitimacy

deficit in its source of authority becomes compounded by serious performance failure
in terms of the expected purposes of rule or standards in its exercise, resulting in a
full-blown legitimacy crisis. This leads in turn to acts of delegitimation by relevant

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
agents, with a possible breakdown of legality as its outcome. Of course a long passage
of time may occur between these different stages, which may end in a form of rule
based largely on coercion and a recognition of impotence in the face of it. As the Arab
Spring has taught us, a decisive shift in the mentality of subordination or subaltern-
hood may be needed for the stage of delegitimation to occur, long after a massive
legitimacy deficit may have been recognized.
If the preceding summary outlines the distinctive elements in my legitimacy analy-
sis, the main body of the chapter will explore the developments made in that analytical
framework by other scholars, both within and outside political science, and my
response to these developments. Many of these have involved a concern to operation-
alize the concept of legitimacy more precisely, so as better to understand its effects on
behaviour and its implications for practice. I begin with the field of criminal justice,
which deals with the police, courts, prisons, and other forms of punishment.

Legitimacy and Criminal Justice

The subject of legitimacy has become a central concern in the field of criminal justice
studies since the early 1990s, which have witnessed an increasingly sophisticated dis-
cussion of what makes for the legitimacy of power-holders, both in their own self-
understanding and that of those subject to their authority. Although these analyses
take their starting point from the political science literature, they move well beyond it
in ways that can prove useful in turn for political science. In what follows I will single
out four issues which seem to me to be importantly raised by these studies.

Legitimacy and Its Epistemology

In the account I gave earlier I drew a sharp distinction between the normative–
analytical approach of the political philosopher to the subject of legitimacy and its
use by the social scientist as a primarily explanatory concept, and I stand by the
importance of observing that distinction. However, the two activities turn out to
be more closely related than I have given credit for, in two respects. First, the
systematic activity of the philosopher in justifying, refining, and improving key
principles and values takes place within a given normative framework (typically
today a liberal-democratic one), whose context-boundedness and historical specifi-
city it is the task of the sociologist of knowledge to identify and explain. It may be
from the latter perspective that judgements from the former—for example that
the system of Nazi rule was a non-legitimate one when assessed against liberal-
democratic criteria—can be seen as inappropriate or anachronistic. Yet the question
of what normative frames or standards are appropriate for assessing a given power
 revisiting legitimacy, twenty years on 23

relation is one which engages, and should engage, both the normative philosopher
and the empirical social scientist alike.
It follows, secondly, that the activity of assessing a given power relationship
against the normative expectations that those involved can reasonably have of it is

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
one that the normative philosopher and the social scientist can both properly
engage in. Both are involved in making judgements, though for different pur-
poses. The idea of a ‘legitimacy deficit’ is one that can be used both to explain
disruptive behaviour or acts of non-compliance and to identify where improve-
ments in a given institution or practice are desirable. It is highly relevant in this
context that the academic criminal justice community has worked very closely
with practitioners in the police and prison services; and that from the standpoint
of the practitioners the academic distinction between normative philosophy and
empirical social science may seem largely irrelevant to the systematic search for
improvement.1

Legitimacy and Normative Justifiability

In this central dimension of legitimacy I have distinguished between being able to
show that one’s authority is derived from a valid source acknowledged in the society,
and that it serves a necessary purpose beyond simply the interests of the power-
holders. We could call these rightful authorization and due performance respectively.
Yet under ‘due performance’ there is a further consideration over and above the
effective realization of a necessary general interest, and that is conformity to socially
expected standards in the exercise of authority. In the criminal justice literature this
aspect has been operationalized and given a central place through the concept of
‘procedural justice’—the idea that the behaviour of those subject to authority,
whether it be cooperation of the public with the police or obedience of prisoners to
prison staff, depends on their being treated fairly and with dignity in their interac-
tions with power-holders. It is the quality of these interactions that determines how
far those exercising authority are regarded as legitimate, and the extent to which
those subject to authority are prepared to cooperate in turn.
In the field of the police and the courts, the idea of ‘procedural justice’ was first
developed by Tom Tyler, and has been subsequently refined in numerous studies,
both by himself and others (see Tyler 1990; Tyler and Huo 2002). His starting point
was to distinguish between instrumental and normative grounds for obedience, and
he succeeded in demonstrating empirically the priority of the latter in explaining
compliance and cooperation. Legitimacy as procedural justice in his definition
includes both fair treatment in decisions by law enforcement authorities and being
treated with dignity and respect in encounters with enforcement officers. It is fair
treatment, he shows, that is crucial to perceptions of legitimacy, and to conforming
behaviour as a result. ‘To the degree that people do regard the police and courts as
legitimate,’ he writes, ‘they are more willing to accept the directives and decisions of

1
For discussions on this epistemological question I am indebted to a recent conference on Legitimacy
and Criminal Justice at the University of Cambridge, and especially to comments by John Dunn.
24 political science perspectives on legitimacy and justice

the police and courts, and the likelihood of defiance, hostility and resistance is dimin-
ished’ (Tyler 2003: 286).
The centrality of fair treatment to perceptions of legitimacy has also been demon-
strated in empirical investigations of order in prisons. In their comparative study of

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
two English prisons, Richard Sparks and Tony Bottoms (2008: 99) came to the conclu-
sion that:
On a day-to-day level most prisoners accept that someone has to have power over
them, on behalf of the State. What then becomes crucial is the way that that power is
exercised. . . . Their perceptions of the fairness of the staff in matters such as manner,
even-handedness, and the quality of explanations given in case of problems are per-
haps the most crucial factors of all in determining whether or not prisoners see the
prison operating in a legitimate manner.2

Generalizing these insights from police and prison research beyond the field of crimi-
nal justice, we can see that the concept of ‘procedural justice’ or fairness constitutes a
special case or example of what I have termed ‘socially expected standards in the exer-
cise of power’. Legitimacy deficits in the political field arise not only from inadequate
or faulty authorization (e.g., electoral fraud), or perceived performance failure (e.g.,
widespread economic hardship or physical insecurity), but also from a violation of
expected standards in the personal dealings of elected officials (e.g., the expenses
scandal among UK parliamentarians). Naturally what these expected standards are
varies greatly across time and space. In some countries ostentatious living is some-
thing expected or at least tolerated on the part of elected leaders (‘But he’s a Big Man’
a Nigerian taxi driver said to me as his President was buying a second passenger jet for
his personal use); whereas in others it can be deeply resented (President Sarkozy
celebrating his 2007 electoral victory in a particularly exclusive Paris restaurant). At
a more mundane level, people’s attitudes to the state can be shaped by the personal
treatment they receive at the hands of the most junior official. In the words of Sparks
and Bottoms (2008: 100), ‘The issue of the subject’s interpersonal handling by parti-
cular agents of “the system” strongly shapes perceptions of the wider institutions
involved.’

Different Audiences for Legitimacy Claims

The idea that there are different audiences for legitimacy claims and their recognition
goes back to Max Weber. All rulers, he argued, have to be convinced of their own
legitimacy to be able to rule effectively, as do also the key administrative staff on whom
the maintenance and enforcement of their rule depends. Yet the quality of obedience
on the part of subjects, he also insisted, depended on their own acknowledgement of
these claims, and they were therefore important addressees of legitimacy discourse
(Weber 1978: 212–6). It is one thing, however, to distinguish the different audiences for
legitimacy claims, another to counterpose these to one another as the basis for com-
peting perspectives on legitimacy, such as endogenous vs. exogenous theories, or

2
See also their book, Prisons and the Problem of Order.
 revisiting legitimacy, twenty years on 25

power holder vs. subject conceptions.3 It seems that the latest impetus for this separa-
tion or opposition stems from Rodney Barker’s book (2001), Legitimating Identities:
The Self-Presentation of Rulers and Subjects, where he insists that the primary audience
for discursive legitimacy claims are power-holders and their immediate staff or

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
coterie. It is this that gives them the self-confidence to sustain their power over their
subjects, for whom legitimations are much less important and consequently absorb
little ‘time, attention, energy or intensity’ on the part of their rulers.
This is an old argument, and one I explicitly challenge in my book (Beetham 1991:
25–34). It is also one that much recent criminological scholarship challenges as well.
This is because, as expressed in a recent article, ‘it is disproportionately the front-line
police officers, rather than their managers, who have direct and recurrent encounters
with citizens and prisoners, and therefore experience their authority being contested
on a day-to-day basis’ (Bottoms and Tankebe 2012: 154). As I argue in my book, we
should distinguish between the legitimations used by the powerful to reinforce their
self-belief, and a legitimate relationship, in which the subjects of power acknowledge
that rightfulness for themselves (Beetham 1991: 31).
That said, it may be important nevertheless to distinguish between the different
perceptions that power-holders and subjects have of their legitimacy. Here the crimi-
nal justice literature shows how different audiences may be concerned with different
dimensions of legitimacy, and assign differential importance to them. Members of the
police, for example, may believe that, provided they act according to the law and in
pursuit of their acknowledged purpose (crime prevention and detection), that is suf-
ficient to ensure their legitimacy. Those subject to their interventions, however, may
be more concerned with being treated fairly than with legal niceties or the precise
scope of authorized police powers. As a consequence, the confidence of the police in
their own legitimacy may turn out to be misplaced, and compromise their relations
with sections of the wider community.
From this follows a second insight, which is that power-holders’ perceptions of
their own legitimacy is not a fixed or static matter, but is open to modification in the
light of evidence from below. A disjunction between power-holders’ and subjects’ per-
ceptions may be modified through dialogue with the latter, either directly or through
representatives, or by the intervention of those involved in advising on police or prison
officer training. This ‘dialogic’ approach to legitimacy, as it has been termed in a recent
article, serves to highlight sites or moments of interaction which may bring about
changes in power-holders’ perceptions of their own legitimacy, most dramatically, of
course, through enquiries into major breakdowns of public or prison order (Bottoms
and Tankebe 2012).
A final topic in the discussion of different audiences for legitimacy claims, and the
interaction between them, which is raised by the criminal justice literature, concerns
the role of third parties who stand outside the direct relation between authorities and
those subject to them. Here the issue concerns the expectations for criminal justice
held by the wider public, and articulated by politicians and the media, and the impact

3
This is one fault I find in an otherwise impressive doctoral thesis by Justice Tankebe, Policing and
Legitimacy in a Post-Colonial Democracy: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Ghana, chapter 1.
26 political science perspectives on legitimacy and justice

these may have in turn on the mode of policing and discipline within prisons, whether
reinforcing or undermining treatment that those subject to it regard as fair. With
regard to prisons, Sparks and Bottoms (2008: 99–100) draw attention to the way in
which ‘wider currents in the political culture constrain and direct the actions of politi-

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
cians and administrators, and undoubtedly ripple through onto the landings and
exercise yards.’ With regard to policing, the fact that there are different audiences in
the wider society, especially in terms of religion and ethnicity, who may not share the
same perception of ‘legitimate policing’, adds a further complexity to the analysis of
multiple audiences and their respective significance.

Confusions Over the Concept of ‘Consent’

‘Consent’ is always a tricky concept, and it might have been clearer if I had avoided
using the term as the third component in my analytical framework of legitimacy. When
I referred to ‘actions expressive of consent’ I intended to show how public acts of recog-
nition or endorsement of an authority by relevant agents served to confer or confirm its
legitimacy, and in some sense to ‘bind in’ those taking part as well as to impress those
not doing so. Whether such actions can be taken to reveal a subjective state of mind
called ‘consent’ is much more debatable, and would no doubt vary according to the
context and type of action. Of the three modes of legitimation I distinguish in Table 2.1,
swearing an oath of allegiance has probably the most binding implications for the par-
ticipants (which is why Sinn Fein MPs refuse to take their seats in the Westminster
parliament). It is less clear what taking part in an election precisely commits its partici-
pants to, or what it reveals about their subjective state of mind or degree of consent,
though it undoubtedly confers legitimacy on the electoral victors. And most notori-
ously, the mass mobilizations organized by or on behalf of authoritarian regimes tell us
little about the state of mind of those participating, though they certainly serve as
impressive public endorsements of a regime and help to demoralize its opponents.
So those who seek to develop a richer or more rounded theory of consent in relation
to legitimacy are perhaps missing the point of what I was doing. It might be helpful to
distinguish between actions which express recognition or acknowledgement of an
authority on the part of relevant agents, and hence contribute to its legitimacy, from
consent as a subjective state of mind, which follows from legitimacy as one of its conse-
quences. Whether such a distinction will remove all confusion from the subject I am
not sure; but it is certainly possible to characterize the former as ‘acts of recognition
or endorsement’ without using the term ‘consent’ at all, as I have done in my earlier
summary. And there is a useful parallelism in using the term ‘legitimation’ to connote
such public acts of endorsement, while its opposite, ‘delegitimation’, connotes public
acts of protest, disobedience, and withdrawal of endorsement or recognition, which
have a delegitimating effect.
In conclusion, studies of legitimacy within the criminal justice field have succeeded
in giving it sharper operational focus and relevance for actual practice, as well as clari-
fying some key conceptual issues involved. These developments can in turn enrich
our understanding of legitimacy as a subject in political science. After all, courts,
police, and prisons constitute a central part of the state. And conclusions about the
 revisiting legitimacy, twenty years on 27

importance of fair treatment and respect can be generalized to other agencies for
which the state is ultimately responsible, whether privatized or not. Indeed it extends
to politicians themselves, who will forfeit legitimacy to the extent that they simply
manipulate their electorates, or fail to treat them with any respect or trust, as research

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
considered in the next section of the chapter will confirm.

Legitimacy and the Nation State

Among the developments in the analysis of state legitimacy over the past 20 years,
foremost is the contribution of Bruce Gilley in his book The Right to Rule: How States
Win and Lose Legitimacy (2009). Like the researchers in the field of criminal justice
he sees legitimacy as an important public good with wide ranging benefits. Like them
he also seeks to operationalize the concept of legitimacy in a way that enables us to
draw clear implications for practice and possible improvement. But where they use a
close-grained, almost anthropological, research method, his method is that of iden-
tifying quantitative indicators which allow for effective large-scale comparisons
between 72 different states and regime types, covering over 80 per cent of the world’s
population (Gilley 2009, chapter 1).4
Starting from the threefold dimensions of legitimacy as legality, normative justifi-
ability, and expressed consent, Gilley identifies nine key attitudinal and behavioural
indicators which are available from cross-national survey and other data, and which
can be aggregated to measure citizens’ perceptions of their state’s legitimacy. These
are, for legality: citizens’ confidence in human rights performance, in the police and
in the civil service respectively (World Values Surveys, 1999–2002); for justifiability,
three surveys of attitudes towards the existing political system and one behavioural
indicator of the incidence of the use of violence in political protests (1996–2000); and
for acts of consent, the degree of payment of readily avoidable taxes, and voter turnout
in national legislative elections. These are then aggregated into an overall legitimacy
score for each state, assessed from the standpoint of its citizens.
The next step, using regression analysis, is to identify which objective features of a
country, social, economic or political, most closely correlate with the legitimacy
scores, and can be taken as explanatory variables for them. These turn out to be prima-
rily political ones. It is a state’s performance in three key respects—good governance,
democratic rights, and economic development/welfare—that are the chief determin-
ants of citizens’ perceptions of its legitimacy. Effective delivery of at least two of these
is needed for a high legitimacy score, Gilley concludes, though trade-offs between
them and shifts over time are possible.
As with much quantitative analysis of the kind Gilley uses, questions can be
raised about his choice of indicators, the method of their aggregation, and possible

4
For a quantitative and comparative study of legitimacy at a regional level, see John Booth and Mitchell
Seligson, The Legitimacy Puzzle in Latin America: Political Support and Democracy in Eight Nations.
28 political science perspectives on legitimacy and justice

circularity between cause and effect. Legitimacy turns out to be both a consequence
of government effectiveness and a contributor to it, through the level of citizen
compliance and cooperation that their recognition of the right to rule brings with
it. Nevertheless, this is a path-breaking work in the way in which some of Gilley’s

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
conclusions parallel those of the criminal justice literature analysed earlier. Two in
particular are worth mentioning here.
First are its implications for practice. A state’s level of legitimacy is not something it
is fated to endure, but can be improved by policy changes and institutional reform. In
particular, poor countries are not necessarily ‘trapped in a cycle of underperformance
and underlegitimacy from which they cannot escape’, as the author’s case study of
Uganda after 1986 exemplifies. States can enhance their legitimacy either through
improving their performance or through shifting it in ways that more closely reflect
citizen preferences, and so ‘bootstrap their way to virtuous cycles of citizen compli-
ance and state effectiveness’ (Gilley 2009: 53–57).
From this stems a second conclusion, that legitimacy is best understood as a
dynamic process of interaction or dialogue between states and their citizens, in
which performance and legitimacy respond to each other. In the case of Uganda,
Gilley writes, the state ‘continually evolved in response to dissent and other forms
of negative feedback. Indeed institutional change . . . can be seen as in constant dia-
logue with the demands of legitimacy.’ And in terms that further echo much of the
criminal justice literature, he concludes that states must learn to trust, respect and
respond to their citizens’ concerns if they wish to achieve legitimacy (2009: 48–49,
90–93, 132).
Among Gilley’s findings that will particularly intrigue political scientists is that
some authoritarian states may have higher scores than some democratic ones. For the
period in question (1996–2000), Morocco, for example, scored marginally higher
than both France and Greece, and Egypt and Jordan above both Slovenia and India. In
the light of the subsequent ‘Arab Spring’, these scores may appear to have been overly
generous. However, Gilley covers himself with the observation that ‘such states may
simply be legitimate for reasons other than their undemocratic nature, and most
people might still prefer if they were democratic.’ We should remain open to the pos-
sibility of legitimate alternatives to democracy, he concludes, but ‘even then such
claims may be overtaken by events’, as indeed they have been in the case of the Arab
countries mentioned (2009: 45–46).5
Most intriguing of all is the high point on Gilley’s legitimacy scale (13 out of 72)
achieved by China, a country on which he is himself an expert. Many commentators
have pointed out how, since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, China’s deficit in
democratic rights has been compensated for by successful economic development
and effective governance, although corruption by party officials is a source of frequent
public complaint. Two further sources of the Chinese state’s legitimacy, over and
above economic and governmental performance, have been suggested by another
expert on legitimacy in China, Heike Holbig, in recent articles.

5
For the table of legitimacy scores, see Gilley (2009: 15).
 revisiting legitimacy, twenty years on 29

One concerns the way in which the Chinese state links its performance to a persua-
sive legitimacy narrative or discourse. It is not just what a state does, but how it
describes what it is doing, that is important for its legitimacy. In the case of China,
ideology has always played a central role, especially for rank and file party cadres, and

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
ideological revision has taken place in parallel with rapidly changing economic poli-
cies and circumstances. So the party ideologues have had to find ways of integrating
new economic elites into their discourse of the working class vanguard, while also
emphasizing the state’s redistributive role in ensuring social harmony and a common
interest. They have had to present the party as an ‘ever-innovative organisation capable
of learning and adapting to an ever-changing economic, social and political environ-
ment’, while also deriving authority from a traditional Confucian model of govern-
ance. Whether such ideological reformulations or consolidations are sufficient to
counter demands for more secure individual rights and greater political participation
remains an open question. In terms of my framework, if the perceived source of the
party’s authority is a kind of self-authorization based on a narrative about its
performance capacity and adaptability, then its legitimacy is doubly vulnerable to per-
formance failure (Holbig 2009).
A further source of legitimacy for the Chinese state analysed by Holbig involves
what I have called ‘third party’ recognition or affirmation, in this case by the inter-
national community. China enjoys high international status both as leader of the devel-
oping nations and as an equal partner of the developed ones through its membership
of the G20, WTO, IMF, etc., not to mention its role as a key regional player. This status
has only been enhanced since the global crisis of 2008, and China’s comparatively suc-
cessful economic recovery from it. Holbig sees this increasing international recogni-
tion as an important resource for China’s internal legitimation. ‘Explicit acts of
recognition by the international community,’ she writes, ‘represent a direct form of
external legitimation that can be readily reproduced in the national discourse’ (2011:
178). In particular, this recognition can be used to compensate for the deficit in the
public manifestation of consent internally. Generalizing from the Chinese example,
Holbig argues that an international dimension of legitimacy should be added to
the threefold configuration of legality, normative justifiability, and expressed consent;
and she shows how an analysis can follow from this of a dynamic interaction between
internal and external legitimation strategies, which may be compensatory, reinforcing,
or sometimes mutually contradictory (2011). This process of interaction will also be
relevant to the literature reviewed in the following section.

Legitimacy and International

Institutions
When we move from the legitimacy of states to that of international institutions it is
clear at once that we are in a completely different domain, whose analysis cannot sim-
ply be ‘read off ’ from the national level. Most writers on the legitimacy of international
30 political science perspectives on legitimacy and justice

bodies, a subject that has been increasingly studied in recent years, would agree in
outline on a number of distinctive features that distinguish it from that of the state.
I review three of the key ones in what follows.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
The Relation Between Power and Legitimacy
At the state and sub-state level power is analytically separable from legitimacy, most
obviously in the power of coercion, but also in an array of incentives and sanctions
available to the relevant authorities. This can make differentiating the respective
motives for compliance a complex matter, though all the authors considered in this
paper regard the acknowledgement of legitimacy as a, if not the, crucial element in
obedience. At the level of international institutions, by way of contrast, a power of
enforcement rarely exists, and the power that is exercised depends almost wholly on
a recognition of its legitimacy to be effective. It follows that it should be easier to detect
its presence or absence than in respect of the state, as Thomas Franck explains in a
much quoted sentence: ‘The international society should be the best social system in
which to observe a “normative” (i.e. legitimated) social order in its pure form precisely
because of the absence of an international government to enforce international laws
and contracts’ (quoted in Hurd 2007: 11).
Ian Clark, in his book Legitimacy in International Society, goes so far as to claim that
legitimacy is constitutive of international society, and that, as a consequence, ‘we can
recount an important part of its history in terms of systematic changes in its legitimat-
ing principles,’ as he indeed proceeds to do (2005: 245–6). Ian Hurd in his book on
legitimacy in the UN Security Council argues that ‘its power derives from its ability to
persuade rather than its ability to coerce,’ and that consequently ‘it has power when it
is seen as legitimate and loses power when that perception recedes’ (2007: 12–13).
We could add that, unlike in the nation state, power in international society is dis-
persed between a host of specialized institutions, and each has therefore to be legiti-
mated separately as well as on a continuous basis, without any overall coordinating
authority.

Audiences for Legitimacy Claims

Whereas in nation states it is the citizens who constitute the ultimate audience for,
and judge of, legitimacy claims, in international society it is the states themselves
who form the key subjects. They are at once the authors of the institutions and
the agents of compliance and enforcement for their mandates. They authorize the
international treaties and the institutions which the treaties establish, through
their participation in the founding conventions or treaty revisions and their subse-
quent ratification. They are called on to comply with the decisions made by those
institutions, and to enforce or give them effect as appropriate within their own
jurisdictions. They therefore constitute the main audience for legitimacy claims
(and counter claims), which are addressed primarily to political elites, though they
may sometimes filter down to national publics when elites feel the need of domes-
tic support.
 revisiting legitimacy, twenty years on 31

Although all states are supposedly equal, in most international organizations

there is a hierarchy of membership, whether constitutionally formalized, as in the
UN Security Council, the World Bank, the IMF etc., or informally arranged through
the superior resources that more powerful states can bring to negotiations, or the

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
more serious consequences which follow from a withdrawal of their cooperation.
The legitimacy of the institutions with a formalized hierarchy is increasingly being
called into question as they are seen to diverge from a norm of fair procedure,
whether in membership, voting or decision making, with corresponding implica-
tions for the acceptability of the decisions that result.6

The Discursive Structure of Legitimacy

It will be useful to present the structure of international legitimacy according to the
tripartite configuration applicable to the nation state, as this helps to identify the key
sites of differentiation between the two levels referred to in much of the relevant litera-
ture. To summarize, international institutions, their officials, and decisional outcomes
are accorded legitimacy to the extent that they conform to the legal requirements set
out in their founding treaties, as authorized by member states (legality, authoriza-
tion). At the normative level, there is an expectation that they should perform effec-
tively in fulfilling the common purposes for which they were established, and that
they should do so according to procedures accepted as fair (normative justifiability).
Finally, legitimacy is confirmed to the extent that states comply with decisional out-
comes, or refrain from acting in ways which manifestly flout the institution’s rules
(expressed consent, legitimation). At each of these levels we can identify significant
differences between the legitimacy of international institutions and that of the states
which authorize them.
As to legality, at the international level, with a few significant exceptions, there
exists no authoritative interpreter of the rules, no ultimate court of adjudication. This
leaves more room for state actors to interpret the law according to their own interests,
as happened notoriously with the interpretation of Security Council resolution 687,
which was used to justify the Iraq invasion of 2003 in the absence of a second UN reso-
lution. Moreover, this very absence of interpretative authority has made it possible to
ignore legal considerations altogether, as in the NATO bombing campaign of Serbia
in 1999. Indeed, Tony Blair’s wider justification for ‘liberal interventionism’ was that
legal considerations should not be allowed to stand in the way of urgent humanitarian
action to forestall potential threats to international peace, which he claimed special
authority to interpret (see Kampfner 2003; Sands 2005).
If normative considerations can be used in this way to trump or subvert legal or
procedural ones, this puts correspondingly greater weight on the dimension of nor-
mative justifiability in international institutions. At the heart of all international trea-
ties lies a norm of international cooperation and common interest in the realization of

6
The idea of a hierarchy of membership is developed by Jean-Marc Coicaud in his paper for the
Cambridge conference, ‘International Legitimacy and International Criminal Justice’. Clark uses the terms
‘core’ and ‘periphery’ for a similar purpose.
32 political science perspectives on legitimacy and justice

specific benefits which states could never achieve by acting on their own. Yet this key
legitimating norm is itself under pressure from the countervailing norm of state sov-
ereignty which helps to legitimate the participating states domestically. Examples of
this tension between the two legitimating principles—between what Clark (2005)

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
calls ‘internal and international legitimacy’—occur frequently, as he himself shows,
though at times they can also serve to reinforce one another. In a recent study of legiti-
macy in the European Court of Human Rights (see Cah et al., forthcoming), the
authors show how the two competing norms of cooperation and sovereignty are
reconciled in the concept of ‘a fair compromise between the purposes and perform-
ance of human rights courts and the purposes of domestic institutions’, and that this
provides the social grounding of the legitimacy of the European Convention of
Human Rights (ECHR). However, this idea of a ‘fair compromise’ is perceived and
interpreted differently by the political elites of the different member countries. Some,
such as the UK, increasingly regard adverse decisions as eroding the court’s legiti-
macy, while others, such as Ireland, see them as compensating for possible parochial-
ism in its internal jurisdiction.7
Finally, as to expressed consent, its distinctive feature at the international level
works in two opposite directions in regards to its legitimating effects. On the one
hand state compliance with the decisions of international institutions, because it is
essentially voluntary, has a much more legitimating force than at the domestic state
level, where compliance may simply be the product of habit or ‘dull compulsion’ in
the face of overwhelming force, and cannot be used as evidence to deduce or enhance
legitimacy. Yet by the same token, refusal to comply is much less costly than at the
domestic state level, and, if repeated, may serve to delegitimate the institution in
question, as US refusals to comply with judgments of the International Court at the
Hague or Israeli refusals to comply with UN resolutions about the occupied territo-
ries exemplify. This dual character of compliance and consent confirms the key fea-
ture of international society identified at the start of this section, that power and
legitimacy are inseparable at the level of international institutions, and that, without
legitimacy they have no power.

A Counter-Example: Power and

Legitimacy In the International
Financial Sector
It is odd that whole books can be written about ‘international society’ or ‘international
organizations’ without mentioning the most dominant player in the international
field, which is the financial sector and its banking and investment institutions.
Of course these are not inter-governmental ones, and in contrast to the latter wield

7
The idea of differential impact of institutions at the European level on member state legitimacy is one
explored by Chris Lord and myself in Legitimacy and the European Union.
 revisiting legitimacy, twenty years on 33

enormous power quite independently of any legitimacy. Although they may compete
among themselves, collectively the sector exercises massive power through its control
of financial resources, and the corresponding dependency of consumers, businesses,
investors, and governments on their decisions for their economic well-being and even

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
survival. The recent history of this sector and its institutions raises two questions
which challenge the legitimacy analysis of this chapter and the original book on which
it is based. First, why does their power need any legitimacy, and, if so, on what grounds
and for which audiences? Secondly, how have they survived a legitimacy crisis of epic
proportions, without any active process of delegitimation following, but instead have
succeeded in displacing the crisis onto our political institutions, whether democratic
governments or the European Union itself?
To take the first question, financial institutions naturally require compliance from
their employees, but this is mainly ensured through a combination of incentives and
sanctions. However, as all writers from Weber onwards agree, those exercising power
need first to be convinced of their own legitimacy, in this case through the pursuit of a
wider social purpose than simply making money for themselves. Financiers also need
to convince governments, legislators, and regulators that their institutional structures,
activities and rewards are justified in terms of satisfying a public interest as well as
acceptable standards of operation. Beyond that there may be a need for a wider social
or public acceptability, though those using their services comply with their require-
ments not out of any normative considerations, but out of simple self-interest. In this
regard, the financial sector may constitute what in my book I describe as a limiting
case of a power system which does not need mass legitimacy to achieve its purposes.
It also fits Rodney Barker’s (2001: 70–71) conception of concentric circles of legiti-
macy audiences, with power-holders and their immediate staffs at the centre, associ-
ates and other elites in the next ring, and the public at the periphery, though I would
argue as an exception rather than the norm.
Even so, the fact that legitimacy is necessary to them can be deduced from the
great lengths to which the financial sector has gone over the years to construct a
legitimating discourse for itself, as well as channels for its effective dissemination.
Financial deregulation and ‘light touch’ regulation were justified by the doctrine of
the self-regulating or ‘rational’ market, bolstered by the whole weight of an academic
economics profession devoted to its elaboration. The huge inverted pyramid of
casino banking and derivatives trading was justified by the added social value that
was being created, together with the fact that, after the repeal of Glass-Steagall, this
structure could only with difficulty be distinguished from the normal investment
and credit activities which have obvious public utility. Finally, the enormous per-
sonal rewards which accrued to financiers were justified on the grounds of the eso-
teric knowledge, unique skills, and burden of responsibility which their work
demanded of them.8

8
These legitimating ideas are explored in John Cassidy’s How Markets Fail: An Anatomy of Irrationality
and Joseph Stiglitz’s Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy. Not everyone would go as
far as Stiglitz when he writes of his own economics profession that ‘it had moved from being a scientific
discipline into being free market capitalism’s biggest cheerleader’ (p. 238).
34 political science perspectives on legitimacy and justice

One by one these justifications were blown apart by the banking crisis of 2007–8.
The free market was exposed as far from self-regulating, and competition between
individual banks and traders to maximize profit for themselves and their investors
was seen to produce system-wide collapse. Many of the bankers’ activities which were

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
claimed to be serving an essential public interest were shown to be, not merely ‘socially
useless’ as the UK’s chief regulator publicly conceded, but economically and socially
damaging. And the claim of financiers to possess an esoteric knowledge and unique
skills justifying their rewards was punctured by the revelation that many of them did
not understand the complex instruments in which they were trading, while the few
who did were happy to bet against them, while continuing to encourage new invest-
ment from others.9
According to my model, a legitimacy crisis on this scale is normally accompanied
by acts of public delegitimation, the active withdrawal of compliance, expulsion from
office or power, and other retributions appropriate to the scale of the disjunction
between the legitimating discourse and the reality that has become exposed to public
view. Why has this not happened in the case of the banks and financial institutions?
Here the people could not act for themselves, as the bankers were both too anony-
mous and too well protected to suffer any personal violations, while people were too
disorganized to follow Eric Cantona’s call for a mass withdrawal of savings. So govern-
ments had to act on their behalf. To be sure, the chief executives of the bailed out
institutions were dismissed, albeit with their gold-plated pensions intact, but this was
no different from normal practice in the sector in the event of failure. What was at
issue was the failure of a whole system, which brought deep recession and widespread
economic distress in its wake. To quote the Governor of the Bank of England: ‘The
price of this financial crisis is being borne by people who absolutely did not cause
it. . . . Never in the field of financial endeavour has so much been owed to so many by
so few.’10
What actions might governments have taken that were proportionate to the sys-
temic failure and would have had an appropriate delegitimating force? At one extreme
they could have let the banks go bust (most were technically insolvent), set up their
own banks, and printed money. Or they could have broken the banks up and forced
creditors and shareholders to pay more of a penalty. Or jailed investment traders for
reckless risk taking. Or outlawed derivatives trading and banned bonuses and capped
salaries across the sector. Or imposed a financial transactions tax, as well as closing
down the tax havens which the sector uses to avoid its public responsibilities. Or dis-
banded the failed ratings agencies. And so on. We can all think of explanations why
none of this happened, among which the absence of any inter-governmental structure
to control the sector, and the institutional capture of individual governments and leg-
islatures by the financial services industry must bulk large.11

9
Evidence for this is provided in Charles Ferguson’s new book, Inside Job: The Financiers Who Pulled Off
the Heist of the Century.
10
Speaking to the UK Commons Treasury Select Committee, 1 March 2011.
11
For institutional capture of government in the UK, see my Democratic Audit paper, ‘Unelected
Oligarchy: Corporate and Financial Dominance in Britain’s Democracy’ (2011) and successive updates
available at: <http://www.democraticaudit.com>.
 revisiting legitimacy, twenty years on 35

However, the cost of not doing any of those options, but instead bailing out the
banks and other institutions with public money, and continuing to do so, has been, on
the one hand, a rapid return to business as usual, since no serious penalty has been
incurred or is in prospect. On the other, the financial crisis has morphed into a sover-

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
eign debt crisis, complete with a new discourse of government profligacy; and the
legitimacy deficit has been displaced onto democratic governments, which have
become the agents of a bank imposed austerity programme. Unlike financial traders,
who can hide behind the impersonality of the market, governments cannot evade
public responsibility and accountability for their actions, even if these are dictated
from elsewhere. Many have simply crumbled under the pressure of public delegitima-
tion, whether through outright collapse, as in Iceland, forced elections leading to elec-
toral wipe-out, as in Ireland and Spain, or the imposition of technocratic rule, as in
Greece and Italy. As we can see, this process of public delegitimation has still a long
way to run.
In conclusion, my model of a legitimacy deficit intensifying to a legitimacy cri-
sis, then bringing acts of public delegitimation in its train, may need some modest
revision in light of the financial collapse of 2007–08. If a legitimacy crisis of such
depth does not result in a process of active delegitimation, we can conclude that if
for some reason it is aborted, then there is a considerable price to pay. On the one
hand, because the power-holders have suffered no public retribution, they will
simply continue as before, only with renewed confidence. On the other, the legiti-
macy crisis may be displaced to another domain, and the active public delegitima-
tion will then be experienced by another set of agents who are simply more
vulnerable to it.
This modest revision of my model exemplifies a broader conclusion I have come to
in this chapter through reviewing the research on legitimacy that has taken place in
many different fields since the publication of the book in 1991. This is that subsequent
research has done much to clarify, enrich, and extend the legitimacy analysis con-
tained there, but not fundamentally to challenge or displace it.

References
Barker, R. (2001) Legitimating Identities: The Self-Presentation of Rulers and Subjects.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Beetham, D. (1991) The Legitimation of Power. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Beetham, D. (2011) ‘Legitimacy’, in Badie, B., Berg-Schlosser, D. and Morlino, L. (eds) The
International Encyclopedia of Political Science. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Beetham, D. and Lord, C. (1998) Legitimacy and the European Union. London: Longman.
Booth, J. and Seligson, M. (2009) The Legitimacy Puzzle in Latin America: Political Support
and Democracy in Eight Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bottoms, A. and Tankebe, J. (2012) ‘Beyond Procedural Justice: A Dialogic Approach to
Legitimacy in Criminal Justice’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 102(1): 119–70.
Cah, B., Koch, A., and Bruch, N. (forthcoming) ‘The Social Legitimacy of the European
Court of Human Rights: An Interpretative Analysis’.
36 political science perspectives on legitimacy and justice

Cassidy, J. (2009) How Markets Fail: An Anatomy of Irrationality. London: Allen Lane.
Clark, I. (2005) Legitimacy in International Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ferguson, C. (2012) Inside Job: The Financiers Who Pulled Off the Heist of the Century.
Oxford: Oneworld.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/9404/chapter/156229884 by National Science & Technology Library user on 03 October 2023
Gilley, B. (2009) The Right to Rule: How States Win and Lose Legitimacy. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Holbig, H. (2009) ‘Ideological Reform and Political Legitimacy in China: Challenges in the
Post-Jiang Era’ (pp. 13–34), in Heberer, T. and Schubert, G. (eds) Regime Legitimacy in
Contemporary China: Institutional Change and Stability. London: Routledge.
Holbig, H. (2011) ‘International Dimensions of Legitimacy: Reflections on Western Theories
and the Chinese Experience’, Journal of Chinese Political Science 16(2): 161–81.
Hurd, I. (2007) After Anarchy: Legitimacy and Power in the United Nations Security Council.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kampfner, J. (2003) Blair’s Wars. London: Simon and Schuster.
Sands, P. (2005) Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules.
London: Allen Lane.
Sparks, R. and Bottoms, A. (2008) ‘Legitimacy and Imprisonment Revisited’ (pp. 91–104),
in Byrne, J., Hummer, D. and Taxman, F. (eds) The Culture of Prison Violence. Boston MA:
Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.
Sparks, R., Bottoms, A., and Hay, W. (1996) Prisons and the Problem of Order. Oxford:
Clarendon.
Stiglitz, J. E. (2010) Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy. London:
Penguin.
Tankebe, J. (2007) ‘Policing and Legitimacy in a Post-Colonial Democracy: A Theoretical
and Empirical Study of Ghana’, PhD Thesis, Cambridge: University of Cambridge.
Tyler, T. R. (1990) Why People Obey the Law. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Tyler, T. R. (2003) ‘Justice, Legitimacy, and the Effective Rule of Law’, Crime and Justice 30:
283–357.
Tyler, T. R. and Huo, Y. J. (2002) Trust in the Law. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. (2 vols), Roth, G.
and Wittich, C. (eds). Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.