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Abstract
This paper highlights scholarly neglect of political legitimacy, the idea of a state's use of power in ways acceptable to its citizens. We argue that political legitimacy affects a state's ability to formulate and implement its policies, thus affecting governance. Our paper provides the first empirical evidence of the positive relationship between political legitimacy and governance. We combine novel cross-sectional data on political legitimacy and several governance indicators from 66 countries. Our results show that a one-standard-deviation increase in the legitimacy score increases the rule of law indicator by about one-third standard deviation. These results are robust across OLS, an instrumental variable method, and several other governance indicators. Moreover, our results reveal that in the presence of greater trust, political legitimacy has an enhanced impact on governance.

AbstractSocial contract theory depicts a constitutional contract as the result of a hypothetical agreement among society's members to escape a prisoners' dilemma situation. It depicts citizens as political equals agreeing to be forced into a cooperative strategy rather than a socially suboptimal strategy that gives them the highest personal payoff. Government is the organization that forces everyone to cooperate. However, citizens can never bargain as political equals. An elite few design the rules, and others are forced to comply with them. The contractarian ideology that depicts government as acting in the general public interest legitimizes the actions of government, giving those elite few who hold government power a greater ability to use it to further their own interests, often at the expense of the masses. Within the context of a prisoners' dilemma game, contractarian ideology leads to an outcome that is socially suboptimal, but beneficial for the political elite.

AbstractIn 2021, unconstitutional transfers of power in Myanmar and Afghanistan highlighted that while States may desire a coherent response to questions about the status of governments, and may look for international guidance in such regard, there is no established process for providing such guidance. Thus, attention focuses on the General Assembly's credentials process, designed to assess the eligibility of delegates to represent their States at the UN. This article proposes that rather than the credentials process being stretched in this way, greater use should be made of the Assembly's competence to pass determinative resolutions on government legitimacy.

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Theoretical and structural issues -- Democracy and international governance -- Intergovernmental societies and the idea of constitutionalism -- Constitutional interpretation in international organizations -- The rationality of the use of force and the evolution of international organization -- Current issues: The changing environment of international organizations -- International organizations in a period of globalization: New (problems of ) legitimacy -- The changing image of international organizations -- International democratic culture and its sources of legitimacy: The case of collective security and peacekeeping operations i -- The legitimacy of Security Council activities under Chapter VII of the UN Charter since the end of the Cold War -- Selected contexts: International organization in transition -- The legitimacy of the World Trade Organization1 -- The process towards the new international AEnancial architecture -- Distributive justice and the World Bank: The pursuit of gender equity in the context of market reform -- Legitimacy in the real world: A case study of the developing countries, non-governmental organizations, and climate change -- Conclusion -- International organizations, the evolution of international politics, and legitimacy -- Acronyms -- Contributors -- Index.

International development agencies invest heavily in institution building in fragile states, including expensive interventions to support democratic elections. Yet little evidence exists on whether elections enhance the domestic legitimacy of governments. Using the random assignment of an innovative election fraudreducing intervention in Afghanistan, we find that decreasing electoral misconduct improves multiple survey measures of attitudes toward government, including: (1) whether Afghanistan is a democracy; (2) whether the police should resolve disputes; (3) whether members of parliament provide services; and (4) willingness to report insurgent behavior to security forces. Moreover, these effects are strongest within the subsample of respondents who were not aware of the fairness-enhancing treatment, leading us to conclude that legitimacy was increased by perceptions of electoral fairness and efficacy.

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