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Existing research on the effects of women's descriptive representation on citizens' attitudes has mainly investigated potential positive effects, namely on political engagement or the legitimacy of outcomes. However, trends in representation have rarely been theorized as potential causes of resentment among women. While a male backlash to increasing representation has been theorized, this article argues that women may also be discontent with their trajectory of representation, if they perceive it as stagnating. Using a survey experiment fielded in Germany, the results show that a stagnating representation trajectory mobilizes women to vote for a progressive party, the German Greens. In contrast, the paper demonstrates that men do not lash back against women's increasing representation, even if they realize that this means a lower standing for themselves. This article contributes to research on political behavior by highlighting that discontent with persisting inequality is a mobilizing factor for progressive parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By now we are familiar with studies which tie being 'left behind' to voter support for populist or other extreme views. In the UK case, this is seen in support for Brexit but can also apply to support of parties such as UKIP (e.g. Bolet, 2021; Ford and Goodwin, 2014). Comparative studies show that electoral support for populist parties in part reflects lowered trust in mainstream politics (e.g. Geurkink et al., 2020; Keefer et al., 2021; Mauk, 2020), which is seen as a behavioural indicator of slipping legitimacy. Political support for populist movements is interpreted as declining legitimacy of existing governments, and that decline is seen as being tied to economic stress and the 'left behind' areas. In this article, we ask whether economics stresses also have impact upon another and possibly more direct measure of government legitimacy – tax morale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special double issue identifies the tools and conditions that allow (re)emerging autocrats to undermine democratic traditions and constrain civil rights across the world. In our introduction, we posit that identifying the tools of the established, emerging, and aspiring authoritarians in today's world is vital, theoretically and practically. It allows us to identify common denominators across specific contexts to advance knowledge about the features and risks that authoritarian regimes pose today. It also permits us to reveal the inter-state and transnational expert networks through which autocrats share strategies, information, and resources to remain in power. Through a global and comparative lens, we thematically organize the articles' key findings. The articles reveal a set of tools of authoritarianism that (re)emerging autocrats use to control media to manipulate public perceptions and delegitimize opponents and critics, seek to maintain the legitimacy of a democratic rule by aligning with "grassroots" social movements composed of extremists and hate organized groups, redefine the meaning of democracy, and use a range of repressive methods domestically and abroad, all while maintaining a façade of democracy. This special issue also captures variation in the successful deployment of autocratic tools as authors caution against equating conditions across different autocratic regimes. We bookend the special issue with a brief reflection on populism on the left and right and what it means for the main themes of the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During armed conflict civilians often inhabit areas of contested governance or areas where rebel groups, NGOs, and/or criminal syndicates vie for authority and challenge the control of the state. As non-state actors confront the authority and legitimacy of the state, civilians become central players in that competition asked to uphold or undercut these alternative governance claims. In this paper we examine the long-term impact of rebel governance for citizens living in spaces where state governance is challenged. Leveraging survey data from areas historically under PKK control in Southeastern Turkey, we focus on the ways in which contestation over governance during the conflict influenced future trust and engagement with the Turkish state. Specifically, we find that individual engagement with rebel governance institutions and personal conflict experience are important factors in understanding the effects of contested governance. Our findings increase our understanding of the long-term impact of armed conflict on civilians and the potential lasting impacts of rebel governance on the post-conflict state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how aid activities by the World Bank and China, which take two competing approaches to building state capacity, affect a recipient government's effort to build state legitimacy vis-à-vis its population. The study operationalized legitimacy drawing on Levi's 'quasi-voluntary compliance,' and empirically analyzed the two approaches' effects at the local level. The study used the Afrobarometer survey conducted in Tanzania in 2014 and geocoded datasets for aid projects. Chinese aid, characterized by its 'Developmental State' approach, was associated with higher projection of state legitimacy at local level. Meanwhile, the World Bank's aid, which encourages building state legitimacy in a 'contractarian' way, did not demonstrate such a correlation, and there was limited evidence that the co-location of projects from both donors may condition the effects of the World Bank aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the uses and functions of visual representations in the articulation of a comprehensive memory of dissent against the Communist regime in Romania. Through qualitative research using the interdisciplinary study of the art and politics of memory, the study answers the question of how artistic renditions of the past differ from official discourse on dissent and how these representations are used politically. This article argues that these artistic representations enrich the understanding of dissent against the Romanian Communist regime and thus play a political role in consolidating a missing or limited memorialization of diverse forms of opposition to the Communist regime, thus disrupting the narrative of perfect control. Artistic discourses about the Communist past include at least three types of portraits of dissenters: (1) anti-Communist heroes who participated in the armed resistance of the 1940s and 1950s; (2) Communist prisoners who are recalled either as victims or "prison saints"; and (3) (extra)ordinary citizens who had nonconforming ideas either through their political activity or through their cultural choices. The latter are recalled as participating in workers' strikes, as exercising a form of personal opposition through their refusal to comply with the regime's natalist policies (dissenting women), or as taking part in broader cultural opposition forms, such as watching Western films on videocassettes. These artistic discourses vary from heroization to politicization, serve to build legitimacy for the democratic regime, explain how dissent had a role in the change of regime, and accentuate individuals' agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public administration is the largest part of the democratic state and a key consideration in understanding its legitimacy. Despite this, democratic theory is notoriously quiet about public administration. One exception is deliberative systems theories, which have recognized the importance of public administration and attempted to incorporate it within their orbit. This article examines how deliberative systems approaches have represented (a) the actors and institutions of public administration, (b) its mode of coordination, (c) its key legitimacy functions, (d) its legitimacy relationships, and (e) the possibilities for deliberative intervention. It argues that constructing public administration through the pre-existing conceptual categories of deliberative democracy, largely developed to explain the legitimacy of law-making, has led to some significant omissions and misunderstandings. The article redresses these issues by providing an expanded conceptualization of public administration, connected to the core concerns of deliberative and other democratic theories with democratic legitimacy and democratic reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional scholarship highlights policy as a frozen landscape, explaining its reluctance to depart from the predetermined trajectories. However, this argument needs to be reassessed to better capture the reality of the Indonesian social policy reform, most notably in healthcare. The reform involved sudden and radical changes from a segmented and decentralized model to a more integrated and inclusive one—outside the critical juncture of the 1998 economic crisis—creating a patchwork of old and new ideas and features within policy institutions. Empirical interview data show that path-creation changes in healthcare reform are characterized by a deviation from the path followed as an institutionally embedded principle. This deviation was made possible due to the considerable influence of academics-turned-senior bureaucrats (policy entrepreneurs), who capitalized on the widespread distrust of the ruling government to drive the desired reform. In addition, the success of Obamacare as a populist healthcare program amid the capitalist US system also undermined the legitimacy of policy actors' previous attempts to reject reform. This article helps clarify the development and application of the path-creation theory, comparing it to established theories to reduce ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how police officers and prosecutors make sense of and speak about their work with hate crimes. Our analysis rests upon Robert Reiner's widely acknowledged claim that policing is inherently political. We identified three core issues that illustrate the political nature of policing hate crimes. First, the politically contingent boundary work of distinguishing criminal from legal acts. Second, the impact of the enforcement of hate crime laws on the reproduction of social inequalities. Third, the "diversity politics" of gaining legitimacy and trust among minorities, which hate crime legislation is meant to protect. While a strong commitment to policing hate crimes is evident among our interviewees, we ask if the politically invested discourse they present may contribute to an absence of critical reflections regarding the limited effect of law enforcement, as well as a lack of engagement with pressing concerns regarding racialized crime control and racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social trust is believed to be beneficial to societal mobilization and the participation in protests. At the same time, state performance, notably of state power structures during instances of social and political protest and change, has an impact on the public perception of and trust in these institutions as well as the assessment of their legitimacy. The police are the most visible manifestation of state authority, which has become particularly apparent during post-electoral protests in Belarus in 2020, when their performance directly influenced and determined further societal mobilization. Based on a mixed-methods design, drawing on interview and survey data, this contribution seeks to shed light on the role of trust in societal mobilization during instances of protest and change in Belarus between 2020 and 2021. One of the main findings is that repression by the regime and its police forces affected both institutional trust and the level of protest mobilization. Protest participation in turn correlates with an increase in social trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though historically important, the notion of tacit consent plays little role in contemporary discussions of political legitimacy. The idea, in fact, is often dismissed as obviously implausible. The ambition of this paper is to challenge this assumption and show that tacit consent can become a key ingredient in a theory of legitimacy. Instead of defining tacit consent through residence (where, according to John Locke or Plato's Socrates, staying in the country amounts to tacitly consenting to its system of rule), the paper explores a different strategy, delimiting tacit consent as an absence of active dissent. The basic idea starts from the fact that widespread anti-government protests and demonstrations always carry a potent delegitimating force. Political legitimacy is therefore never permanent and unchangeable, regardless of the nature of the regime, and can be undermined at all times by active dissent from the population. Having established the relationship between dissent and delegitimation of political power, even the inverted, stronger claim is defended: the absence of active dissent (i.e., tacit consent) can, under certain circumstances, serve to legitimize political power. The paper sets up and defends several conditions that need to be met for the right normative mandate to be created by the population tacitly accepting the existing power arrangements. If those are fulfilled (especially when full freedom of expression and information is granted), tacit consent can become a vital element of political legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scholars express concern for the continued resilience of democracy in the face of multiple crises. In times of crisis, social movements articulate grievances and make demands of political leaders and policymakers. In contrast to the wave of pro-democracy movements following the 2008 global financial crash where protesters demanded accountability from elites, mobilization during the COVID-19 pandemic has defied expectations in several key ways. First, the expectation for protesters to mobilize primarily online in the face of the restrictions and risk associated with large gatherings has not been upheld. Instead, we have witnessed widespread "offline" mass protests. Second, despite high mortality rates and significant disparities in the effectiveness of national public health responses, we have not witnessed widespread mobilizations demanding governments do better to protect citizens from the virus. Instead, we have seen two radically different responses: At one extreme, veterans of "pro-democracy" movements have "pivoted," using their skills and experience to either make up for weak government responses to COVID-19 (Hong Kong) or to reinforce government efforts to contain it (Taiwan). At the other extreme, "antidemocratic" and predominantly far right-wing movements have mobilized against public health measures, circulating COVID negationist and conspiracy messages. Indeed, the political weaponization of disinformation has been a notable feature of pandemic mobilization. I analyze these contrasting trends, highlighting the challenges they pose for the effective handling of the pandemic, and their broader implications for democratic legitimacy and resilience. In so doing, I call attention to the ways that mobilization during the pandemic challenges scholars to revisit some of our assumptions about the dynamics of social movements in times of crisis, and how they can foster or erode democracy. The analysis also suggests that scholars analyzing the impact of information disorders on democracy need to pay careful attention to offline protest as well as online transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deliberative mini-publics are increasingly used to try to tackle public discontent with the functioning of democracy. However, the ability of mini-publics to increase perceptions of legitimate decision-making among citizens at large remains unclear, given especially that existing studies have not considered the potentially damaging effects of mini-public recommendations not being followed. We designed, pre-registered, and ran a survey experiment in Ireland to test the effects of mini-publics on legitimacy perceptions conditional on whether or not their non-binding policy recommendations are honored (N = 1309). We find that mini-publics increase legitimacy perceptions among the broader citizenry; however, these beneficial effects are largely limited to situations in which their recommendations are honored. Additional results suggest that it makes no difference whether mini-public recommendations are overturned by elected representatives or by citizens in a referendum. Finally, we find that the legitimacy-enhancing effects of participatory processes are driven by citizens with low political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the concept of "AI governance" is frequently used in the debate, it is still rather undertheorized. Often it seems to refer to the mechanisms and structures needed to avoid "bad" outcomes and achieve "good" outcomes with regard to the ethical problems artificial intelligence is thought to actualize. In this article we argue that, although this outcome-focused view captures one important aspect of "good governance," its emphasis on effects runs the risk of overlooking important procedural aspects of good AI governance. One of the most important properties of good AI governance is political legitimacy. Starting out from the assumptions that AI governance should be seen as global in scope and that political legitimacy requires at least a democratic minimum, this article has a twofold aim: to develop a theoretical framework for theorizing the political legitimacy of global AI governance, and to demonstrate how it can be used as a compass for critially assessing the legitimacy of actual instances of global AI governance. Elaborating on a distinction between "governance by AI" and "governance of AI" in relation to different kinds of authority and different kinds of decision-making leads us to the conclusions that much of the existing global AI governance lacks important properties necessary for political legitimacy, and that political legitimacy would be negatively impacted if we handed over certain forms of decision-making to artificial intelligence systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an exploratory qualitative study into how tribunals of inquiry act as instruments of legitimacy and hegemony for the State. Focusing on a case study of two consecutive tribunals of inquiry into the biggest health scandal in the history of the Irish State, the paper draws on ritual theory to offer a view of the tribunal as a process of ritualization, a strategic way of acting by the State in times of crisis. Through this process of ritualization, an authoritative, structured and structuring ritualized environment is created with schemes of ritualization imposed on participants directed toward creating ritualized bodies, hoped-for acceptance of the tribunal's projection of reality and the re-legitimation of the role of the State in undertaking its core functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I defend a new argument against moralist theories of legitimacy and in favour of realist theories. Moralist theories, I argue, are vulnerable to ideological and wishful thinking because they do not connect the demands of legitimacy with the interests of rulers. Realist theories, however, generally do manage to make this connection. This is because satisfying the usual realist criteria for legitimacy – the creation of a stable political order that transcends brute coercion – is usually necessary for rulers to preserve their rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times, representation theory has become one of the most productive and interesting sub-fields in democratic theory. Arguably, the most important theoretical innovation are the so-called 'constructivist' approaches to political representation. These approaches play a central role in Creating Political Presence: The New Politics of Democratic Representation and The Constructivist Turn in Political Representation, two impressive volumes that take stock of the state of the art in representation theory. I discuss the two volumes by focusing on three broader and interconnected themes: the problem that constructivism is meant to respond to, the tendency of representation theorists to expand the possibilities of representation as broadly as possible, and the normative aspects of political representation and how constructivists deal with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to analyze the relationships between economic policy uncertainty (EPU), state legitimacy, entrepreneurial activity, and business opportunities. To achieve this goal, 13 European countries are selected for the period 2002 to 2018. Applying partial least squares structural equation modeling, relevant findings were obtained. The results show that higher economic uncertainty is associated with an increase in a country's entrepreneurial activity, although the perception of entrepreneurial opportunities does not increase. We also observed an inverse relationship between EPU and legitimacy. A higher perception of legitimacy is related to lower entrepreneurial activity and higher opportunities for entrepreneurship. These findings have relevant implications. From the academic point of view, the results make new contributions to research related to the importance of the institutional context and entrepreneurial activity, considering the relationships between EPU and legitimacy and their influence on entrepreneurial activity. We also highlight how policymakers may influence the perception of state legitimacy and, therefore, have an impact on entrepreneurial activities and opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rachel Friedman's Probable Justice and Jeffrey Friedman's Power without Knowledge explore the promises and pitfalls of the application of predictive tools to the solution of social and political problems. Rachel Friedman argues that a fundamental duality in philosophical interpretations of probability allowed social insurance schemes to successfully accommodate two rival visions of liberal justice over the centuries. But in focusing on ideas around probability, she misses the limitations of the experts who put these ideas into practice and threatened to undermine them in the process. Jeffrey Friedman, by contrast, is centrally concerned with the limitations of experts. While he shows how these undermine one rather narrow conception of technocratic legitimacy, he avoids examining their implications for democratic legitimacy understood more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policing institutions throughout the world face a legitimacy crisis. This crisis' immediacy necessitates the exploration of theories that provide answers regarding effective reforms. The representation theory of policing offers one such answer; it holds that accountability mechanisms are an avenue for public input that increases confidence in police and affords them democratic legitimacy. This article applies and evaluates representation theory by examining one such reform attempt: post-Troubles policing restructuring and its impact on relations between police and the militant nationalist community within West Belfast. It assesses print media coverage of accountability reforms throughout the peace negotiation period and the early years of reform implementation and ultimately affirms the association between police legitimacy and accountability; however, it also suggests that this association is more complex than a simple positive correlation. Rather, legitimacy is correlated with public debate regarding accountability that encompasses both positive and negative evaluations of policing. This indicates that the predominance of police accountability as a subject of public discourse may serve as an essential component of efforts to instill policing with democratic legitimacy. The article presents an original model of representation theory that more accurately reflects the dynamics of legitimacy-building efforts in West Belfast and proposes applications of this advancement to the contemporary, global movement advocating for police reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a body of literature that informs and analyzes the effects of policy, policy feedback research will benefit from more qualitative research designs with marginalized populations. Qualitative research designs allow for theoretical and conceptual development, as well as ensure multiple perspectives are fully captured. This article argues that qualitative methods with different populations will expand applications of policy feedback theory and lead to critical insights for its development. Three examples of potential areas of theory development are outlined including informing the variable of participation, examining more nuanced effects of specific policy elements, and understanding the interactions of multiple policies. The article concludes with the suggestion of more mixed-method designs utilizing qualitative approaches involving participants to test existing hypotheses and inform new relationships. Policy feedback theory raises vital questions of democratic legitimacy and policy effectiveness that benefit from research conducted with, and informed by, marginalized populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Carlos Alvarado and Nayib Bukele, presidents of Costa Rica and El Salvador, respectively, employed Facebook throughout 2020 to communicate about the COVID-19 pandemic. The study draws on content analysis of 1584 posts made by both presidents on Facebook throughout 2020. The article argues that Alvarado and Bukele turned the pandemic into a means to build political legitimacy in their specific political context through two main strategies: populist communication and permanent campaigning. Whereas Alvarado relied on these strategies to demonstrate that he was in control of the country amid mounting backlash, Bukele infused both strategies with a religious imaginary to attack political opponents and perform the role of El Salvador's messiah. This analysis broadens the understanding of the relationship between populist communication and permanent campaigning in two main ways. First, by employing a comparative approach to identify singularities and differences in the ways that presidents built political legitimacy during the pandemic in a largely under-examined region (Central America). Second, by situating findings within a wide temporal perspective that included posts in an entire calendar year and comparisons with Alvarado's and Bukele's presidential campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the January 6th, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol, it seemed clear that the public sphere in the U.S. was being challenged by political extremists. Yet, existing public sphere normative theories provide unsatisfying tools for explaining why the riots occurred. Participants in the contemporary U.S. public sphere do not seem to recognize the legitimacy of their political opponents, and there is an increasing turn toward raw assertion instead of rational deliberation. In this essay, we discuss these shortcomings, focusing on how internet-mediated communication makes basic assumptions about legitimacy and rationality untenable. We settle on the concept of an "assertive turn" in the public sphere and analyze how anti-rationalism is becoming dominant in political discourse. We then argue for a scholarly reckoning with the social reality of 21st century U.S. politics—mainly that there are significant gaps in normative theory when it comes to addressing the assertive turn in the U.S. public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bullying is a perennial problem in correctional institutions. This study aims to investigate the prevalence of bullying perpetration in young correctional institutions, and to identify environmental and personal factors as predictors of bullying perpetration. A cross-sectional survey was carried out among 289 male and female young people from eight correctional institutions in Malaysia. The Direct and Indirect Prisoner Behavior Checklist (DIPC-SCALEDr) was used to measure both bullying perpetration and victimization. The study reported more than 90% of the participants engaged in at least one behavior indicative of bullying others during the 1 month period. Participants reported involvement across six bullying forms. Direct logistic regression analysis identified eight significant predictors of bullying perpetration i.e. time served in the institution, disciplinary punishment; gang membership, no self-injury, respect, bureaucratic legitimacy, fairness, and family contact. To conclude, this study confirms bullying perpetration is determined by both personal and environmental factors. Juvenile justice system can use these key findings to anchor future interventions to prevent bullying and other forms of violence in correctional institution. In the future, this study might include a focus on staff-offender bullying and protective factors for bulling perpetration in correctional institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Huaca La Capilla in the Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, as a dynamic locus within a mythologized Moche mortuary landscape. Huaca La Capilla is a Late Moche (AD 650–740) monumental adobe construction located within the elite Moche cemetery of San José de Moro. This huaca was subject to constant architectural renovations and the intricate design of its interior plazas and patios suggests the orchestration of symbolic and collective social gatherings. The striking resemblances between this huaca 's enclosures and those depicted in the Moche iconographic scene of the Burial Theme are intriguing, suggesting that Huaca La Capilla was the locus of body-centered performances that preceded the burial of Moche elite individuals. This study draws on the notion of deathscape, incorporating a multi-scalar approach to the study of landscapes of death and their diverse spatial and material practices. It contributes to broader discussions of how mortuary landscapes and their monuments were involved in the (re)production of myths of ancestrality and particular notions of time, history, and construction of the being that gave political legitimacy to ruling groups in times of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of the state of emergency is one of the most frequently evoked elements from Carl Schmitt's thought. In discussions which are referring to it, however, the conceptualization of the state of emergency, which Schmitt proposed in his juridical comment on Article 48 of the Weimar Republic's constitution, is often linked with the theory of Ausnahmezustand. In this article I propose to separate the state of emergency from Ausnahmezustand. The main difference between the two consists in the different types of legitimacy. The state of emergency from the Constitution of the Weimar Republic finds its legitimacy in this document, however, read by Schmitt in a way that in his Constitutional Theory, he referred to it as relativization. To find legitimacy of the state without a name, one must refer to Schmitt's political theology as not just a proposal rooted in the faith in Revelation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship has pointed to an artificial hierarchy between political and lifestyle journalism that is rooted in norms and values stemming from Western-liberal thought. Within this distinction, lifestyle journalism has been subordinated as occupying a marginal or peripheral position in the field. Yet, how journalists perceive this distinction has rarely been studied empirically. This study draws on concepts of 'boundary work' and 'othering' to examine how political and lifestyle journalists discursively reinforce and contest boundaries and hierarchies. Through semi-structured interviews with 22 lifestyle and 26 political journalists and editors in South Africa, we show that political and lifestyle journalists engaged in both intra-field (self-)expansion, and (self-)expulsion and (self-)othering, by evoking several boundary markers. Boundaries were reinforced through gendered discourses, autonomy ideals, claims to specialization and accessibility in news beats and presentation, beliefs about political journalism's preservation of humanity, and greater risks to safety of political journalists. Boundaries were challenged by politicizing lifestyle journalism and popularizing political journalism, providing a counter-narrative to political journalism's negativity, and treating lifestyle journalism as economically beneficial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the geographies of the German coal exit by looking at the spatial dimensions of coal devaluation. It argues that while the Energiewende has been described as having a national origin, central triggers of the national coal exit agreement have to do with devaluation pressures created by the combination of global relations in the fuel markets, the territorial bordering of electricity and carbon markets at the European Union level, and place-based and multiscalar anticoal networks. The role of place-based resistance to the past, relational, expected, and imaginary concomitant forms of devaluation in lignite regions is also described as a key spatial barrier to the German coal phase-out. It will be shown that the emergence of a coal exit agreement, which represents a national fix to address not only existing market devaluation forces, but also a double legitimacy crisis for the government, was based on spatially uneven relations. The German case is relevant for the geographies of energy transitions for showing how multispatial strategies, the spatial organization of energy markets, and the territorial regulation of energy systems shape the possibilities for the devaluation needed to accelerate the pace of the fossil fuels phase-out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ernest Hemingway arrived in Istanbul on 30 September 1922 to cover the end of the Greek–Turkish War for the Toronto Star. From late October to mid-November 1922, Hemingway wrote 20 articles about the last days of the war and the re-constellation of political legitimacy in the region. There are four distinguishing features of Hemingway's reports from Constantinople. First, they provided an eloquent depiction of the city, suggesting the charm and squalor of old 'Constan' for the young writer. The second was a clear expectation of a 'second disaster', which was assumed to be a replica of Smyrna. Hemingway clearly observed the fears of non-Muslims and foreigners in the city, who were panicking over possible new massacres and pillage. Third, Hemingway quickly realized that the exodus of people – the desperate flight of Christian refugees – and Turkification of the country would be his main subject. His repeated emphasis on refugees permanent loss of a home is reminiscent of Hannah Arendt's famous essay 'We Refugees', as well as a precursor to Agamben's point that refugees are reduced to 'bare life'. Lastly, his prose relied on irony and cynicism, as a cover for his disappointment and shame for humanity and modern civilization. Juxtaposing his writing with contemporary local accounts, I intend to situate his witnessing into the larger historiography of 'Armistice Istanbul' and the homogenization policies of the winning Turkish nationalist leadership. Hemingway's critique of (homogeneous) nation-state formation after the war and the favourable involvement of the Allied countries and humanitarian agencies in the mass production of refugees was quite exceptional and ahead of his times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During a civil war, does external intelligence assistance reduce violence perpetrated by the recipient government against civilians? I contend that intelligence assistance reduces violence against civilians by facilitating identification problems and adopting a "winning-hearts-and-minds strategy," which enhances the recipient government's legitimacy and intelligence potential. Enhanced intelligence capability solves the recipient government's identification problems. I examined this logic using a dataset on external support and one-sided violence between 1990 and 2008. The empirical findings show that external intelligence assistance reduces the recipient government's violence against civilians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fostering legitimate authority has become a priority of the international peacebuilding and development community, notably in fragile states and conflict-affected settings. Yet, how peacebuilding and development interventions feed into legitimation practices of public authorities remains underexplored, let alone how interveners can strategize on this. Analysis of programs to support land registration in Northern Uganda brings out how interventions not just enhance the legitimacy of targeted authorities. Often unintentionally, they impact on struggles for legitimacy between different state and nonstate authorities and change their relative legitimacy. They do so by redistributing land governance roles and responsibilities; stimulating certain practices of land governance; and contributing to the discussion on legitimacy assessments. The conclusion argues for more sensitivity to legitimation effects of peacebuilding and development interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An account is provided of the historical context of the work one of the best-known figures in British psychology in the 20th century, Hans Eysenck. Recently some of this has come under critical scrutiny, especially in relation to claims of data rigging in his model of smoking and morbidity, produced from the 1960s to the 1980s. The article places that controversy, and others associated with Eysenck, in the longer context of the shifting forms of epistemological and political legitimacy within British psychology in the past hundred years. Eysenck was both lionised and disparaged during his life and after his death. This account explores that ambiguity in order to discern the challenge for British psychology to maintain disciplinary coherence. An understanding of this fluxing historical picture is guided by the meta-theoretical resource of critical realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voluntary certification that signals nonprofit organizations' legitimacy has been found to be positively related to charitable donations in Europe and North America. However, whether these proxies of organizational legitimacy matter under authoritarian regimes where political connections are deemed critical for resource acquisition has not been explored. Based on a sample of 2,021 Chinese foundations, this article finds that organizational legitimacy achieved through certification is tied to an increase in charitable donations. Meanwhile, organizational legitimacy tends to negatively moderate the relationship between foundations' political affiliation and charitable donations. That is, certification lifts the amount of charitable donations to civic foundations that are not formally affiliated with the state more than it does for politically affiliated foundations. As the first quantitative study on the effect of voluntary nonprofit certification programs on charitable donations outside Western democracies, this article contributes to our understanding of fundraising in China and other authoritarian states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the field of conservative news nonprofits, using discourse analysis to explore their missions and other public statements. We find that many of these organizations draw on the legitimacy of mainstream journalism outlets while critiquing them, at once associating with and dissociating from them. This enables them to justify their engagement in political activism even as they obscure their ideological orientations and funding sources, behaviors that challenge the normative boundaries of mainstream commercial journalism in the U.S. This work shows how self-described outsiders to a field build and maintain boundaries to legitimate their own work in relation to that field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a combination of FOIA-requested legislative committee hearings and in-depth interviews, this manuscript investigates the work of Illinois prosecutorial lobbyists in state-level crime policy during a time of penal reform. I find that prosecutorial lobbyists are a regular and influential presence in policy discussions, advocating primarily for 'law and order' policies that expand prosecutorial discretion, even following the Great Recession. I also find that they repeatedly evoke their relationship to crime victims to frame their policy positions for a bipartisan audience. However, attention to discourse reveals that victims' own interests regularly clash with prosecutorial discretion. These clashes create what I term discursive ruptures, or uncomfortable and surprising rhetorical fissures that emerge in what is otherwise seen as a near iron-clad political alliance. In such instances, prosecutors risk alienating a key source of their political legitimacy to protect their own discretionary authority. Beyond insight into momentary political discomfort, these ruptures suggest that the powerful and productive alliance between prosecutors and victims is neither as natural nor as robust as relational perspectives have generally assumed, unearthing fault lines in prosecutors' unparalleled power to punish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accepting defeat in political decision-making is crucial for the health of democracies. At the same time, being a good loser is challenging. How can citizens be motivated to be gracious about various types of political loss? In this paper, we study whether political leaders can play an important role in boosting the perceived quality of decision-making processes among losers in policy conflicts. We propose and test the impact of a simple intervention post-decision: good loser messages delivered by co-partisan leaders that remind citizens about the rules of the game. Three survey experiments on probability samples of the Norwegian and Swedish population (total n = 4700) show that good loser messages can indeed boost the process evaluations of policy losers. These findings emphasize the potential of procedural messaging to build loser's consent between elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic had severe impacts in Latin America, with small businesses intensely affected. Beyond its economic consequences, the pandemic also exacerbated structural flaws in some of the region's weakly institutionalised democracies, diminishing State legitimacy and expanding that of organised criminal groups. In considering how State governance from above is challenged by non-state governance from below, this article examines a "pandemic micropolitics" as seen through the lens of support to the small business sector. We outline a framework to understand co-governance in hybrid political orders during crises; and examine this using case studies of urban informal markets and the transport sector in El Salvador. In showing that the pandemic contributed to a renegotiation of co-governance between the State, criminal organisations, and business associations, we contribute to understandings of the dynamics of distributive politics and the co-governance of crisis; and the potential implications for a post-COVID-19 political economy in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The association between corruption and poverty, inequality, economic development and resource distribution has been investigated widely in the Indonesian context. However, the impact of corruption on political legitimacy is still understudied, particularly for post-Soeharto Indonesia. Hence, we are left with many puzzles and a baffling picture of political legitimacy. This research corrects this picture and aims to ascertain two interrelated questions: (a) how and in what way does corruption erode political legitimacy? and (b) what evidence suggests that corruption deteriorates legitimacy? A qualitative and a quantitative research method are deployed to address these questions. The quantitative analysis demonstrates that corruption is statistically significant in predicting political legitimacy, suggesting that corruption erodes citizens' trust in the rule of law, democracy, political actors and institutions. The qualitative model reinforces the quantitative results that corruption undermines the rule of law, hijacks democracy and erodes people's trust in political actors and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overestimation of the level of democracy is prevalent among citizens in nondemocracies. Despite such prevalence, no research to date has systematically documented this phenomenon and examined its determinants. Yet given the renewed interest in the role of legitimacy in authoritarian survival, studying whether and why this phenomenon arises is important to our understanding of authoritarian resilience. I argue that, even in the absence of democratic institutions in nondemocracies, autocrats exercise media control in order to boost their democratic legitimacy. This façade of democracy, in turn, benefits their survival. Combining media freedom data with individual survey response data that include over 30,000 observations from 22 nondemocracies, I find that overestimation of the level of democracy is greater in countries with stronger media control. But highly educated citizens overestimate less. These findings shed light on media control as a strategy for authoritarian survival, and have important implications for modernization theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last several years, democratic citizens and theorists have been grappling with an upsurge in political commentary on the crisis and decline of democratic legitimacy around the world. Increasingly, theoretical attention is turning from the philosophical justification of ambitious moral ideals of democracy, to the interpretation of potentials within existing political practice for democratic renewal and repair. This review article examines three new books at the forefront of this theoretical turn towards engagement with the real-world political dynamics of democratic crisis and revival: Open Democracy by Hélène Landemore; Hope for Democracy by John Gastil and Katherine Knobloch; and Mending Democracy by Carolyn Hendriks, Selen Ercan and John Boswell. It begins by surveying the new contributions of these books – highlighting the importance all attribute to creative political agency as a source of revival in democratic practice. It then discusses several questions left unresolved by these books – concerning the problem of democratic legitimacy, the normativity of democratic standards and the power dynamics undergirding democratic agency – which jointly mark out an important agenda for future theoretical work on pathways out of democratic crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the notion of energopower (Boyer 2014) to show the foundational role of electricity in the (re)production of political power in Australia. I show how conflicts surrounding electricity have reconstituted state-market-society relations and rescaled governance. I study a series of notable national-scale interventions and argue that, through the contingent and chaotic play of events in the political sphere, market-oriented governance regimes for electricity have been weakened, and the issue of electricity decarbonisation has become 'weaponised' for electoral benefit. I explain how national political leadership in Australia has stepped in from a constitutionally-weak position to govern electricity under pressure for environmentally-driven adaptation. I show four statecraft techniques that reconstitute electricity in new ways: discursively linking electricity governance to socio-environmental futures; national interest framings that are weaponized for electoral gain; tactical governance through parliamentary compromise and appeasement; and jettisoning market logics in favour of state intervention. This study recognises the limits of centralized state-making under a Federalist system but shows the potential for statecraft to reshape scalar-territorial relations and strengthen the role of the central state vis-à-vis the market. Vital resources like electricity are not just struggled over but, under the right conditions, can come to shape political power. There is neither infinite potential for state rescaling through the performance of legitimacy, nor do rigid scalar hierarchies simply block reconfigurations of state power. To understand the potential for resource struggles to re-scale state power attention must be paid to the techniques of statecraft that support and undermine legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By exploring the operation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since its rise to power in 1949, this article demonstrates how a non-democratic regime maintains its legitimacy. While previous studies have shed light on the CCP's sources of legitimacy, few abundantly and comparatively discuss the different forms of legitimacy and how legitimacy changes over time in a non-democratic state. This study addresses these gaps by analyzing how the CCP's operational principles change over time, including changes in sources and forms of legitimacy. This study uses different frameworks of legitimacy to facilitate the comparison of changes in legitimacy of different leadership generations, and also demonstrates the specification of legitimacy of the CCP from different perspectives. By comparing the sources and forms of legitimacy of different generations of regime leaders, this study demonstrates that after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the CCP regime lacked substantial legitimacy based on political participation, and thus emphasized instrumental legitimacy based on economic development instead. Using process tracing to analyze policy changes, this study argues that different CCP leadership generations employed different sources and forms of legitimacy to maintain regime support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article conducts a scoping review to explore the key determinants of political legitimacy in participatory budgeting. The scoping review employs a comprehensive search of Scopus to select relevant studies. Three main sources of legitimacy emerge from this analysis: (1) institutions, (2) citizen participation, and (3) deliberation. The findings reveal that participatory budgeting can significantly affect political legitimacy through these mechanisms. In addition, the study highlights the relevance of legitimacy, as it relates to participatory budgeting, in both democratic and non-democratic contexts, with particular attention to participatory budgeting practices in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Initiatives that attribute expert status to 'ordinary citizens' proliferate in a range of societal realms and are generally celebrated for 'democratising expertise'. By tapping new sources of knowledge and participation simultaneously, such 'citizen expertise' practices seem to provide responses to the contemporary decline of trust in political elites and traditional experts that seriously challenges the legitimacy of democratic policy-making. This study distinguishes between three quintessential types of citizen expertise ('local knowledge', 'service user involvement' and 'citizen science') and, from an integrated perspective, critically discusses the value of citizen expertise for public knowledge production and democratic governance. Drawing on empirical insights and on theories of democracy and of expertise and knowledge, the concepts of expertise and participation are refined and quality conditions of citizen expertise are developed. The study argues that citizen expertise is epistemically particularly valuable when it is based on distinct, non-ubiquitous experiences and on collective, not just individual, insights. It contends that representativeness is key to the democratic legitimacy of citizen experts in the policy context and points to the key role of organised civil society in establishing the required accountability relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue patterns of state failure are influenced by variation in how states emerged as independent political actors. In particular, states with positive birth legacies, those whose emergence required relatively high levels of capacity and legitimacy, should be less likely to experience state failure than countries that experienced less auspicious births. We assess this claim on the universe of states in the international system between 1950 and 2002 with multistate duration models that estimate the probabilities states transition into and out of periods of failure. We find that states with positive birth legacies are less likely to experience state failure and that this relationship is driven by states with positive birth legacies being able to more quickly transition from failure back to being functioning states. Our findings offer evidence that state failure is usefully thought of in the context of state-making processes and show that how states emerge as independent actors influences phenomena central to comparative and international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars exploring transitions to personalist rule focus on coercive power transfer to personalist rulers and argue that forming viable political coalitions, undermining power-sharing agreements, and mobilizing non-democratic institutions play a crucial role in transferring coercive power. However, no regime can rule by coercion alone, and transitions to personalist rule also involve making new frameworks of legitimacy. Exploring the connections between Turkey's recent transition to personalist rule and the drastic jump in the number of insult proceedings that accompanied the transition, this article finds that insult proceedings play a particular role in making new frameworks of legitimacy in transitions to personalist rule. We argue that insult proceedings work as a coercive method of punishment that curbs dissent while constructing a new framework of legitimacy based on the ruler's charisma. The study builds on an in-depth examination of insult cases filed during Erdoğan's presidency in Turkey and interviews with legal experts and suspects. It contributes to the understanding of the use of laws and legality in autocratization processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asking citizens "the way democracy works" is the basis of a wide literature on the support citizens have for their political institutions and is one of the most common survey items in political science. Moreover, it is a key indicator for the purported global decline in legitimacy. Yet, its trends, levels, and dynamics are still debated, and conclusions may be erroneous. In this paper, we compile a unique global dataset between 1973 and 2018 encompassing all major cross-national datasets and national election studies in twelve countries to study the dynamics and consistency of "satisfaction with democracy" (SWD) measures globally. Our results show that while trends and between-country differences in democratic satisfaction are largely similar, the levels of satisfaction vary substantially between survey projects, and both trends and levels vary significantly in several widely studied countries. We show that this has consequences at the individual level: opting for one survey over another may alter our conclusions about the relationship between key demographics and SWD. Thus, researchers studying SWD should endeavor to consult diverse survey sources and should be cautious about their conclusions when they do not, especially when it comes to making claims about changes in SWD over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the article is to discuss how and to what extent co-creation has the capacity to strengthen democratic legitimacy. By distinguishing between output-based and input-based co-creation, and by discussing types of legitimacy in relation to deliberative, participatory, and representative conceptions of democracy, the article points to potentials and pitfalls inherent in the idea of co-creation. Four examples from Denmark and Norway are used to illustrate the argument. In conclusion, the article points to main challenges associated with co-creation which deserves more research—particularly inequality of individual resources and the clash with the party-political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soccer is seen as an extended instrument to brand China in the post-Beijing Olympic period. This article explores how the brand of China is expressed and negotiated through the lens of soccer by adopting the content analysis method to deconstruct the media texts specific to sports mega-events. The findings show the creation of a number of media frames accompanied by a new tradition in the representation of Chinese national identity, featuring the rhetoric of a 'powerful' nation and social prosperity attributed to the projected common goal of elevating China to be a world soccer superpower by 2050. These media frames provide insights into the underlying personalities of the country's brand, including humiliation, world hegemony, trust and superiority. We argue that the merit of nation branding in China is more engaged with the inwardly oriented political exercise aiming at restructuring national identity for the purpose of consolidating the state's legitimacy and social cohesion. The proposed sports nation branding framework expands the scope of critical research on nation branding within the context of identity politics in relation to sports. It underlines the significance of strengthening the personality traits of a nation's brand through developing a thriving soccer culture. Due to the growing importance of soccer in East Asia, this article has both domestic and regional significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]