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When introducing Napoleonic rule in Belgium, French administrators were careful to adapt the representation of state power to local traditions and historical culture. As Napoléon's rule was presented as the continuation of earlier dynasties, Old Regime ceremonial was reactivated in his honor and local history was rewritten around his person. The goal of this operation was to gain support for the regime among the local population, which annexation and six years of revolutionary rule under the Directory had left distrustful of French authority. Different levels of government (mayors, prefects, ministers) joined efforts to bridge the gap by linking the new regime with local identities through the mobilization of the local past, resulting in a political representation wholly different from the one in the French heartland. The regime thus proved much more willing to consider local identities and traditions than has hitherto been assumed.

Despite the increasing deployment of formalized boundary spanning roles and practices, the mechanisms and dynamics of their legitimation remain under-explored. Using the Bourdieusian lens, we theorize legitimation of boundary spanning as accumulation, mobilization and conversion of several forms of capital unfolding in a configuration of intersecting fields. Drawing on a qualitative longitudinal case study of a collaborative partnership between a university and healthcare organizations, we describe changes in the structure, sources and mutual convertibility of capital assets over time. We also analyse the implications of this evolution for the relationships between the intersecting fields and the social trajectory of boundary spanners. We argue that legitimation of boundary spanning roles and practices is a highly transformative, collective and political process that increases the capital endowments and authority of individual boundary spanning agents but may lead to the erosion of the very same roles and practices that were being legitimized.

Expanding the domain of majority rule is widely seen as desirable for the European Union. But the functioning of majority rule depends on preconditions that are seldom taken into account. The basic precondition is that overruled minorities accept majority decisions instead of exiting the voting unit. The specific problem of applying majority rule in the European Union is that overruled minorities at the European level are majorities at the nation-state level. By distinguishing between three dimensions of conflicts – content, time and space – the article analyses under what conditions it is possible to expect minorities to accept majority decisions, thus enabling the resolution of conflict by majority rule at the European level.

AbstractGovernments routinely justify why the regime over which they preside is entitled to rule. These claims to legitimacy are both an expression of and shape of how a rule is being exercised. In this paper, we introduce new expert-coded measures of regime legitimation strategies (RLS) for 183 countries in the world from 1900 to 2019. Country experts rated the extent to which governments justify their rule based onperformance, the person of the leader, rational-legal procedures, and ideology. They were also asked to qualify the ideology of the regime. The main purposes of this paper are to present the conceptual basis for the measure, describe the data, and provide convergent, content, and construct validity tests for new measures. Our measure of regime legitimation performs well in all these three validation tests, most notably, the construct validity exercise which explores commonly held beliefs about leadership under populist rule.

Governments routinely justify why the regime over which they preside is entitled to rule. These claims to legitimacy are both an expression of and shape of how a rule is being exercised. In this paper, we introduce new expert-coded measures of regime legitimation strategies (RLS) for 183 countries in the world from 1900 to 2019. Country experts rated the extent to which governments justify their rule based on performance, the person of the leader, rational-legal procedures, and ideology. They were also asked to qualify the ideology of the regime. The main purposes of this paper are to present the conceptual basis for the measure, describe the data, and provide convergent, content, and construct validity tests for new measures. Our measure of regime legitimation performs well in all these three validation tests, most notably, the construct validity exercise which explores commonly held beliefs about leadership under populist rule.

Transnational non-state governance supplies a growing proportion of the rules and regulations that govern the global economy, raising pressing questions about its legitimacy. Cutting across established perspectives, this article adopts the empirical approach of legitimation research to explain variation in the choice of normative strategies to create legitimacy for private rules. To this end, it reviews existing explanations of institutional design in private governance research and integrates them into a common framework of analysis. This framework is put to work in three in-depth case studies, tracing the formation of multi-stakeholder governance in the field of sustainable agriculture – currently the most dynamic site of transnational non-state institution building. The case studies reveal that a full explanation of variation in the use of participation-, expert-, and procedural fairness-based strategies needs to consider both the internal mechanisms of institutional choice as well as differences in the political environments in which these choices are taken.

Summary. Introduction. For our country which once again found itself at the civilization crossroads of its historical development the issue of historical memory of the nation became extremely urgent. Under these conditions distinct trends of history rewriting are formed in the state policy of memory that actualized the problem of its legitimation. The purpose of the article is explication of the heuristic potential of the discursive-ethical methodology of modern communicative practical philosophy for solving the needs or at least mitigating the whole complex of issues associated with legitimation of historical memory. Methods. The phenomenon of historical memory is revealed on the basis of defining the content of the cognitive component in the structure of historical memory by referring to the methodology of knowledge sociology. Important vectors of its genesis and modern transformation are researched in the methodological horizon of the critical philosophy of history and methodological innovations of postmodernist historiology. Results of the research. In the article it is presented that memory as knowledge about the past is inherent with dynamic nature which is the consequence of both natural forgetting process and purposeful state policy on history rewriting with the aim to use its legitimate potential because historical memory is the socio-cultural foundation of the living world, it is the source of individual and collective identity and a powerful factor in social integration and society consolidation. It is claimed that the updated (rewritten) history itself needs legitimation. However, the criterion of its legitimation can not serve to the full extent as a factor of truth in description of the events in the past because the historian's appeal to the past inevitably occurs from the perspective of his own subjectivity. Novelty of the research results. It is proved that discourse-ethical methodology enables to harmonize such vectors as universal/contextual in the aspect of solving the problems concerning historical memory legitimation by means of achieving intersubjective understanding in the communicative process of all interested parties on the basis of compliance with a number of priori prerequisites for its organization. Conclusions. Historical memory reveals the ability to function as a powerful lever for legitimizing of social institutions, social forms of life and state policy. However, on the other hand, it itself as a factor of spirituality needs legitimation not only because of history politicization – "memory conflict" of its carriers, but also due to the purely internal problems of historiography – the "memories conflict" having been generated in particular by its methodological innovations.