Suchergebnisse

Within just one year, the world witnessed the collapse of elected governments in Mali, Afghanistan, and Guinea. While the power grabs by military juntas in Mali and Guinea and by the Taliban in Afghanistan caused fear among the respective populations, many citizens were also willing to acquiesce to the overtaking forces, because the deposed civilian governments were perceived as failing and corrupt. These developments highlight important lessons about government legitimacy in fragile states.
There is more to government legitimacy than elections. The holding of elections alone often does not suffice to render a government legitimate in the eyes of citizens. Questionable or botched elections can do more harm than good to government legitimacy.
In weak and fragile states, governments cannot rely on citizens' acceptance of state institutions to legitimate their authority. They must find alternative ways to continually legitimate their rule in the eyes of citizens.
Insights from Burkina Faso suggest that government legitimacy can be improved by addressing problems of state-society relations. Even in communities that have very strained relations with the state, most citizens actually desire greater state presence and would be willing to give state institutions and security forces the benefit of the doubt - if they were perceived to be doing more to protect people's safety and livelihoods.
If the conditions are right, local governments can play a crucial role in mitigating the central state's deficient capacity and legitimacy. In some areas, local governments are the most powerful and legitimate political actors in citizens' lives.
In dealing with governments that are deficient in legitimacy, international actors should be guided by a careful analysis of state-society relations. Calls for rapid elections are no panacea, and elected governments should not automatically be considered legitimate representatives of society. Instead, international actors should focus on identifying and supporting societal changes that are prerequisites for more legitimate governance.

"Governing requires choices, and hence trade-offs between conflicting goals or criteria. This book asserts that legitimate governance requires explanations for such trade-offs and then demonstrates that such explanations can always be found, though not for every possible choice. In so doing, John W. Patty and Elizabeth Maggie Penn use the tools of social choice theory to provide a new and discriminating theory of legitimacy. In contrast with both earlier critics and defenders of social choice theory, Patty and Penn argue that the classic impossibility theorems of Arrow, Gibbard, and Satterthwaite are inescapably relevant to, and indeed justify, democratic institutions. Specifically, these institutions exist to do more than simply make policy - through their procedures and proceedings, these institutions make sense of the trade-offs required when controversial policy decisions must be made"--

This volume provides a state-of-the-art assessment of citizens' beliefs in the legitimacy of modern Western democracies, an overview of current explanations of fluctuations in these beliefs (both over-time and cross-national), and a perspective on fruitful future lines of investigation into political legitimacy.

Elections can enhance state legitimacy. One way is by improving citizens' attitudes toward government, thereby increasing their willingness to comply with rules and regulations. We investigate whether reducing fraud in elections improves attitudes toward government in a fragile state. A large, randomly assigned fraud-reducing intervention in Afghan elections leads to improvement in two indices, one measuring attitudes toward their government, and another measuring stated willingness to comply with governance. Thus, reducing electoral fraud may offer a practical, cost-effective method of enhancing governance in a fragile state.

Legitimacy is the most important property of state power, and the lack of uniformity of the terminology in modern science used significantly complicates the study of this phenomenon. The article considers the concepts of "legitimacy of state power", "grounds of legitimacy", "mechanism of legitimization", "means of legitimization". On the basis of an analysis of the views existing in science, it is concluded that these concepts have different meaning. In addition, the author explores the importance of elections as a mechanism for legitimizing power and concludes that authoritarian regimes are unable to justify their own legitimacy by this means.

It is often held that the establishment of electoral democracy is key to the creation of political legitimacy. This article challenges this idea and presents an alternative. Many empirical studies reveal that electoral democracy has no necessary implications for the establishment of legitimacy. Even in the successful and stable Nordic democracies, there is scant evidence that legitimacy is created on the input side of the political system. For example political legitimacy in the former Yugoslavia broke down not because ethnic groups realized they would become permanent minorities but because the new Croatian state violated citizens' rights in the exercise of power. Legitimacy turns out to be created, maintained, and destroyed not at the input but at the output side of the political system. Hence, political legitimacy depends at least as much on the quality of government than on the capacity of electoral systems to create effective representation.

This book confronts one of the central questions of political science: how people choose to accept or not to accept particular governments. In contrast to the prevailing view that citizens' decisions about the legitimacy of their governments are strongly conditioned by political culture and socialization and are hence largely non-rational, Ronald Rogowski argues that such decisions may indeed be the product of rational choice. The book proceeds both from recent work in the theory of voting and constitutional choice and from the older tradition of contract theory to postulate that decisions a

Contemporary planning and governance of cities involves practices of experiments and trials in urban experiments, collaborative platforms, and urban development projects with high ambitions for sustainability and innovative solutions. These practices of experimental governance can be seen as new policy instruments that include actors from all sectors of society in collective problem-solving. The introduction of experimental governance establishes a new logic of public administration that results in multiple opportunities and challenges. Previous research has emphasised the importance of organisational development beyond a focus on single experimental projects and institutional designs to support experimentation. This thesis aims to examine the municipalities' organisational capacity for experimental governance and the opportunities to ensure legitimacy. The thesis involves a case study of the City of Stockholm and its innovative practices in general and experimental governance practices in particular. The focus is on the municipal organisation and how it has developed over the past decade, rather than single experiments, collaborations, and projects. Using a qualitative research approach, empirical data was collected by shadowing City of Stockholm staff members, while also conducting semi-structured interviews, participatory observations, and document studies. The thesis comprises four research articles: three using the City of Stockholm as an empirical case of a municipality engaged in experimental governance, and one that develops theoretical insights using examples from Stockholm. The first article provides a discussion of municipal innovation approaches and their influence of institutional logics. The second article is about municipal functions related to experiments, and how these functions challenge the local government. The third article examines the work of experiments and partnerships in policy and practice from a legitimacy perspective. The fourth article explores the institutional capacity for ...