Legitimacy, popularity and the construction of political myth : Contemporary discussions

Abstract

In the absence of legal-rational legitimacy in the Weberian sense, any president succeeding Vladimir Putin in contemporary Russia would be hard put to find a recipe to maintain popularity and, ultimately, stability and order. The paper discusses these principal problems from the analytical perspective of classical and newer theories of legitimacy and also reflects on what implications the dominant mix of legitimation strategies may have should a situation of political succession suddenly arise. Against the backdrop of recent processes of political succession in other authoritarian settings, Weber's writings about the routinization of charisma – how charismatic legitimacy can conceivably be converted into other, more durable kinds - are drawn upon and interpreted in light of contemporary developments.