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In order to be successful, the process of European unification has to be paralleled by a growing legitimacy of European polities, politics, & policies in the eyes of the European citizenry. However, with political institutions moving away from citizens' daily lives, understanding politics will get more complicated, & the chances to influence politics directly will weaken. In this situation, the local political level gains importance because the link between the citizens & politics is closest here. Concentrating on feelings of political competence & using aggregated micro data from 1999 for 12 European countries, this article first investigates the role of the local level as a resource of political legitimacy for higher levels of government. Second, it looks for causal links between structural factors, eg, as local autonomy, the integrative capacity of the local political structures, &/or size of locality, & the socialization function of local politics. The analyses support the function of the local level as a "training ground" for democracy, but the consequences of local autonomy for this function are ambivalent. 4 Tables, 3 Figures, 27 References. Adapted from the source document.

Debates about the legitimacy of political orders have long turned on the question of how political power should be limited. In the debate about the legitimacy of the European Union (EU), a 'neo-Madisonian' vision has emerged that identifies in the multi-level nature of the EU a contemporary version of Madison's argument about the separation of powers and checks and balances. The article situates this account of the EU's legitimacy within the wider trajectory of European integration and argues that these neo-Madisonian scholars make the mistakes of presuming that all limits upon the exercise of power are legitimate and of treating sovereignty and legitimacy as oppositional concepts. By returning to Madison's argument in the Federalist Papers, the article highlights the connection between legitimacy, limited power and the principle of popular sovereignty and the implications of this for how we should think about the EU's legitimacy in the future.

Coppa reviews 'Street-Level Leadership: Discretion and Legitimacy in Front-Line Public Service' by Janet Coble Vinzant and Lane Crothers.

AbstractCan political institutions be too legitimate for their own good? The standard view of legitimacy treats it purely as a resource—political institutions that enjoy legitimacy can draw on voluntary cooperation among their subjects to reach their aims, which is believed to make them more effective than institutions that lack legitimacy and must instead use coercion or bribery to reach aims. We challenge this conventional wisdom by advancing a more general theory that is sensitive also to the costs of legitimacy. High levels of legitimacy, we suggest, can make political actors complacent about the status quo and cause them to pay insufficient attention to problems related to implementation. In contrast, low levels of legitimacy—or legitimacy crises—can serve as a wake-up call and motivate actors to work harder to reach their original or wider goals. We illustrate this theory through a case study of the African Union, assessing when and how legitimacy serves as a cost or as a resource for political institutions, with implications for decision-making, implementation, and effectiveness.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of tables -- List of figures -- Notes on contributors -- 1 By what right? competing sources of legitimacy in intractable conflicts -- 2 Legitimate agents of peacebuilding: deliberative governance in zones of peace -- 3 Between shadow citizenship and civil resistance: shifting local orders in a Colombian war-torn community -- 4 Civilian noncooperation as a source of legitimacy: innovative youth reactions in the face of local violence -- 5 External peacebuilders and the search for legitimacy: the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy in Kashmir -- 6 Legitimacy, international accompaniment, and land reform in Colombia -- 7 Harnessing legitimacy through networks: civilian-led, closed virtual communities as a new type of zone of peace -- 8 Targets of violence, zones of peace: the child and school as post-conflict spaces -- 9 Peace as a tool of war: non-state armed actors and humanitarian agreements -- 10 Twisted legitimacy? leadership, representation, and status in traditional and fragile societies -- 11 Hybrid sources of legitimacy: peacebuilding and statebuilding in Somaliland -- 12 Legitimacy, peace, and peacebuilding -- Index

The article analyzes the legitimacy as a complex, many-sided and multi-level education, argues that the legitimation of power is carried out at different levels, and the process of legitimation involves both individuals and various groups and organizations. It is noted that the legitimacy is represented as a goal of the functioning of all institutions of public authority and as a result, which is meaningfully concretized with a series of interrelated phenomena (legitimization, legitimate regime and etc.). In its turn, the concept of "legitimacy" is interpreted by the authors as the estimated characteristics, applying to either specific political actors and their actions (personified legitimacy), or to existing institutions and public-authoritative activity (institutional, impersonal). The article also introduces the author's approach to the allocation of interconnected levels of legitimacy: 1) the types of internal (motivational) and external (institutional) legitimacy; 2) the types of legitimate domination defining the dominant strategies of substantiation of existing institutions and the ways of social processes managing; 3) the regimes of the legitimation; 4) the forms of substantiation of a state power as such, and its inherent institutional and legal structure. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n5s3p209

Abstract Thai political life is caught in a tension, sometimes temporally rendered as an oscillation, between extremes of democracy and egalitarianism on the one hand and authoritarian relics of older structures on the other. The confrontation between Red and Yellow Shirts leading up to the 2014 coup might seem to suggest a binary model of Thai political ideology, but the internal complexities of both groups belie a simplistic model of two parties with diametrically opposed views and homogeneous composition. In this article, I argue that it is more productive to approach these tendencies in terms of political performances by politicians representing mutually overlapping and often strikingly convergent ideological tendencies. With the benefit of hindsight, I analyse the 2004 Bangkok gubernatorial election – and in particular one key rally held at Thammasat University ten days before polling day – as a case study in the value of an approach from what I have called 'social poetics' for understanding the dynamics of electoral performance, showing how the relevant social actors play more or less creatively with established norms of electoral conduct.

Legitimacy is regarded as one critical aspect of biodiversity management and nature conservation arrangements. Multi-level governance is claimed to pose several challenges to legitimacy. The aim of this paper is to review some legitimacy challenges in multilevel governance contexts, and to analyse empirically biodiversity governance in different EU countries in the light of these challenges. Four legitimacy criteria - legal compatibility, accountability, representation and inclusion, and transparency - serve as a framework for theoretical and empirical analysis. The analysis is based on twelve cases of multilevel biodiversity governance from different EU countries. The results show that several of the legitimacy challenges in multilevel governance can be observed in the cases, for example the poor inclusion of certain concerns at some time points of the decision process, difficulties in being accountable towards multiple levels simultaneously, or the weak visibility of the decision process either for the general public or for the immediate participants.

Examines constraints on national party federations meant to establish a link between mass opinion and public decisions of the European Union, and some positive developments.