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International wird seit den 1990er-Jahren eine Zunahme an staatlichen Kontrollpraktiken im öffentlichen Raum beobachtet, die sich gegen sozial marginalisierte Personen und Gruppen richten. In der Schweiz erhielt die Polizei mit dem Instrument der Wegweisung weitreichende Befugnisse, um missliebige Personen aus öffentlichen Gebieten auszuschließen. Parallel dazu richteten viele Städte und größere Gemeinden nichtpolizeiliche Ordnungsdienste ein, um Störungen der öffentlichen Ordnung soziokommunikativ anzugehen. Anders als die Polizei operieren diese mit ihrem Soft Policing unterhalb einer hoheitlichen Schwelle, womit die Eingriffsautorität des Staates kaum mehr greifbar wird. Demgegenüber inszeniert sich die Polizei als legitimes Autoritätsverhältnis qua Recht. Mit ihrer repressiven Wegweisung begibt sie sich jedoch in eine legitimatorische Grauzone, die rechtsstaatlich nicht ausreichend eingehegt und abgesichert werden kann. Sowohl die Polizei als auch die Ordnungsdienste agieren mit einem illegitimen Autoritätsanspruch, der Ausprägungen eines gegenwärtigen autoritären Urbanismus erkennen lässt und in rechtsstaatlicher Hinsicht problematisch ist., Internationally, an increase in state control practices in public spaces directed against socially marginalized individuals and groups has been observed since the 1990s. In Switzerland, the instrument of expulsion gave the police extensive powers to exclude people who were perceived as disorderly and disruptive. Simultaneously, many cities and larger municipalities established non-police order services to address public disorder in a socio-communicative manner. Unlike the police, these services operate with soft policing below the threshold of the sovereign state, making the state’s authority to intervene barely tangible. In contrast, the police present themselves as a legitimate authority qua law. With their repressive expulsion, however, they enter a legitimatory gray zone that cannot be sufficiently contained and safeguarded by the rule of law. Both the police and the order services act with an illegitimate claim to authority, which reveals characteristics of a current authoritarian urbanism and is problematic in terms of the state under the rule of law.

Ungarns Verfassung von 2012 steht als symbolträchtigstes rechtliches Dokument der Ära Orbán seit seiner Verabschiedung europaweit im Kreuzfeuer der Kritik. Die Vorwürfe beziehen sich auf das ausgrenzende Verfahren der Verfassungsgebung, die ideologische Aufladung und auf die Aushebelung der Gewaltenteilung. Das Werk sucht rechtsdogmatisch begründete Antworten auf diese Kritikpunkte und verwendet hierfür die Errungenschaften der europäischen und der ungarischen Verfassungstradition als Maßstab. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit widmet der Autor den Höhen und Tiefen der ungarischen Rechtsgeschichte, der Zeit ab 1989/90 und letzten Endes der Frage, ob mit einer langen Lebensdauer des Grundgesetzes in einem demokratischen Europa gerechnet werden kann., Hungary's 2012 Basic Law, the most symbolic legal document of the Orbán era, has been in the crossfire of criticism throughout Europe from the moment it has been adopted. The objections refer to the exclusionary procedure of constitution-making, the ideological bias, and the undermining of the separation of powers. This study seeks well-founded legal dogmatic answers to these criticisms, using the achievements of the European and Hungarian constitutional traditions as a yardstick. Special attention is paid to the ups and downs of Hungarian legal history, to the period after 1989/90, and finally to the question of whether the Fundamental Law can be expected to have a long life in a democratic Europe.

Die folgende Analyse unternimmt den Versuch, die gegenwärtige russische Elite zu beschreiben, ihre Genese, ihre Beziehung zum System bis hin zu ihrem verbindenden Element. Dabei kann festgehalten werden, dass die derzeitige Elite in Russland stark integriert und eng differenziert ist. Folglich schafft es das Regime nur äußerst spärlich, die Vielfalt gesellschaftlicher Gruppen zu repräsentieren. Zudem gelang es, die Elite durch Jahrzehnte eines auferlegten Konsenses und umfangreicher wirtschaftlicher Ressourcen, die durch Staatsunternehmen erlangt und durch staatliche Institutionen verteilt wurden, zu integrieren. Allerdings kann diese feste Integration der Elite nur eine formale sein, und ist gewissermaßen nur eine geschickte Imitation. Machtkämpfe im System sind eine Frage der Zeit.

An analysis of Community-Oriented Policing (COP) in 12 post-conflict cases suggests that while the concept of COP holds promise of representing a more sustainable approach to conventional post-conflict police reform, among our cases, there are limited examples of successful COP. Rather, our cases reveal that COP is often perceived as much as a surveillance tool to legitimise harsh policing tactics, as promoting human security or serious reforms. The more robust finding, unsurprisningly, is that the levels of trust between the police and communities, and thus the viability of COP, is closely linked to whether the police act more as a service or a force. While the principles of COP are connected to a police service, in the ideal-typical sense, the post-conflict cases we have analysed are closer to the ideal-typical police force. A number of challenges and what seem to make COP more viable across cases are identified, which should be taken into account when COP is implemented in societies where a police force is the predominiant way of policing.

As global awareness of environmental and social issues intensifies, sustainability has become imperative for all sectors of society, with corporations playing a pivotal role in this paradigm shift. Among these corporations, banks hold a crucial position as influential financial intermediaries that can significantly impact the socio-environmental landscape. The present master thesis aims to explore the legitimation strategies employed by Austrian banks in the context of sustainability and the discourses they construct. The research question answered is: How do Austrian banks use rhetorical and discursive strategies in their sustainability reports to establish themselves as legitimate, and how is the discourse on sustainability thereby constructed? Legitimacy Theory is the theoretical framework that is applied in this study. Furthermore, this research was conducted from a poststructuralist perspective, emphasizing the importance of language. Adopting a qualitative approach, the research analyzes eight sustainability reports from two Austrian banks, utilizing Fairclough's critical discourse analysis. The findings offer a comprehensive understanding of how banks strategically utilize various rhetorical and discursive strategies to manage different types of legitimacy, leading to the emergence of multiple discourses on sustainability. The most dominant discourse is the business discourse on sustainability. By shedding light on how banks use language to legitimize their actions and construct specific sustainability discourses, this work expands scholarly knowledge on legitimation strategies and enriches understanding of the interplay between language, legitimacy, and sustainability in the corporate sector., Miriam Schwarz, Masterarbeit Universität Innsbruck 2023

Wie sollen Rechtssysteme auf Regeln reagieren, die Provider von Netzgemeinschaften wie Facebook oder World of Warcraft Nutzenden auferlegen? Das positive Recht gibt hierauf keine verlässliche Antwort. Erst ein Verständnis der Legitimität der Regeln ermöglicht ein Austarieren des Verhältnisses zwischen den Regelwerken von Netzgemeinschaften und Rechtssystemen. Nach Literaturstimmen sollen die Regeln durch außerrechtliche Mechanismen (z.B. direktdemokratische Verfahren), eine gerichtliche Kontrolle nach verfassungsrechtlichen Kriterien oder Zivilverfassungen legitimiert werden. Es ist aber zweifelhaft, ob Netzgemeinschaften legitime außerrechtliche Mechanismen schaffen können, ob sie wie Staaten behandelt werden sollten und ob Zivilverfassungen entstehen werden. Die Arbeit schlägt ein alternatives Modell vor: Im deutschen Zivilrecht zeichnet sich ein Legitimitätsmodell für private Regeln ab, das auf Regeln von Netzgemeinschaften anwendbar ist und als transnationale Schablone dienen kann. Danach werden die Regeln durch die Zustimmung und das Wohl der Nutzenden legitimiert. Letzteres gewährleistet ein Ausbeutungsschutz der Nutzenden in Form einer gerichtlichen Kontrolle. Die Anwendung des Modells führt zu folgenden Erkenntnissen: 1. Geschriebene Regeln sind schwach durch Zustimmung legitimiert. Eine gerichtliche Kontrolle nach vertragsrechtlichen Kriterien (bei Regelungen des Austauschverhältnisses zwischen Providern und Nutzenden) oder grundrechtlichen Kriterien (bei Verhaltensregeln) verleiht ihnen zusätzliche Legitimität. Die Kontrollintensität hängt von der Höhe des Ausbeutungsrisikos und der Existenz von legitimen außerrechtlichen Mechanismen ab. 2. Code-Regeln (z.B. Newsfeed- Algorithmen) sind auch nur schwach durch Zustimmung legitimiert. Gerichtliche Kontrollmöglichkeiten, die sie gegenüber Nutzenden legitimieren, müssen noch geschaffen werden. 3. Geschriebene und Code-Regeln sind illegitim gegenüber Nichtnutzenden, weil sie nicht auf deren Zustimmung beruhen., How should legal systems respond to rules that virtual community providers such as Facebook or World of Warcraft impose on users? To answer this question, we must look beyond black letter law. Only an understanding of the legitimacy of these rules allows us to balance out their relationship with legal systems. Current scholarship theorizes their legitimacy as follows: Non-legal mechanisms (e.g. direct voting systems), judicial review according to constitutional principles, or digital civil constitutions may legitimize the rules. Yet, three points remain doubtful: whether virtual communities can develop legitimate self-governance mechanisms, whether they should be treated like states, and whether digital civil constitutions will effectively emerge. This work proposes an alternative legitimacy model: German private law reflects a legitimacy model for private rule-making applicable to rules of virtual communities which can serve as a transnational template. This model suggests that the rules can derive legitimacy from two sources: user consent and the common good of users, the latter ensured by judicial review protecting users against exploitation. This leads to the following key findings: 1. Written rules of virtual communities are weakly legitimized by user consent but derive additional legitimacy from judicial review. Contract law standard applies to rules that govern the bilateral exchange relationship between providers and users. General rules of conduct for users are checked against fundamental rights. The required intensity of review depends on the risk of user exploitation and the presence of legitimate self-governance mechanisms. 2. Rules embedded in computer code (e.g. newsfeed algorithms) are poorly legitimized by user consent. Judicial review procedures legitimizing them towards users still need to be established. 3. Both written rules and rules embedded in computer code are not legitimate towards non-users since non-users have not consented to them.

This paper discusses the concept of authority in global governance by unpacking the components that characterize its various notions. These components are the triadic relationship between power, legitimacy, and the reference to public interests, and how they are embedded in the constellation between public and private. After clarifying each of these components, the article applies them to business enterprises - key actors in global governance -, focusing on the issue area of business and human rights. The paper shows that business authority does not neatly fit into the public-private distinction that is pervasive in conceptions of global governance and the international human rights regime. Instead, businesses have public and private, as well as hybrid, roles in global governance. Business authority then forms a peculiar third, next to public authority and private authority. Accordingly, the paper suggests extending the two-pole constellation of public and private into a three-pole constellation, with business building a peculiar third position between and beyond the public and the private. This approach allows furthering the understanding of business authority in global governance in particular and the concept of authority in global governance more generally., Den pluralen Perspektiven auf Autorität in der Global Governance sind vier Elemente gemeinsam. Autorität lässt sich demnach bestimmen als ein triadisches Verhältnis zwischen Macht, Legitimität und dem Bezug auf öffentliche Interessen. Diese Triade ist eingebettet in eine vermittelte Konstellation von Öffentlichkeit und Privatheit. Nach einer konzeptuellen Klärung dieser vier Elemente von Autorität diskutiert das Paper Unternehmen als zentrale Governance-Akteure im Themenbereich Wirtschaft und Menschenrechte. Deutlich wird, dass die Autorität von Unternehmen sich nicht in die Unterscheidung von öffentlich und privat einordnen lässt, die gleichwohl für die Governance-Forschung und für das internationale Menschenrechtsregime prägend ist. Vielmehr haben Unternehmen sowohl öffentliche als auch private und darüber hinaus auch hybride Governance-Rollen inne. Ausgehend von den Konzepten privater Autorität und öffentlicher Autorität schlägt das Paper daher vor, Unternehmens-Autorität als eine dritte Form zu verstehen, die gleichzeitig zwischen und jenseits von Öffentlichkeit und Privatheit situiert ist. Diese Perspektive trägt zu einem erweiterten Verständnis von Unternehmens-Autorität in der Global Governance bei und erlaubt sowohl konzeptuelle als auch normative Anknüpfungspunkte.

Legitimacy is essential for compliance. Agreements between the European Union and Ukraine contain a commitment to enhance labour standards. Certain audiences view this commitment as just symbolic and reflective of the low degree of legitimacy the commitment has. All this could now change following Ukraine’s requested accession to the EU.

In nur neun Monaten hat Tunesiens Präsident Kais Saied alle Macht an sich gerissen und die seit dem Umbruch 2011 etablierten Institutionen der jungen Demokratie demontiert. Mit einer neuen Verfassung, die per Referendum am 25. Juli 2022 abgesegnet werden soll, will er eine "Neue Republik" begründen. Saieds Pläne spalten das Land: Es wächst der Widerstand politischer und zivilgesellschaftlicher Akteure, die einen inklusiven Prozess einfordern. Unterdessen nähert sich Tunesien der Zahlungsunfähigkeit. Seine europäischen Partner, die viel in die Demokratisierung investiert haben, kommentieren die Entwicklungen in Richtung Autokratie mit Sorge, haben aber kaum Maßnahmen ergriffen. Mit jedem weiteren Schritt Saieds wird es schwieriger, Einfluss zu nehmen. Im Interesse der Stabilität des Landes gilt es, so bald wie möglich finanzielle und diplomatische Hebel zu nutzen, die Europa und der Internationale Währungs­fonds aufgrund der wirtschaftlichen und finanziellen Abhängigkeit Tunesiens haben. (Autorenreferat)

The political, organizational, and ideological deadlock that European social democracy has gone through in recent decades is obvious and much discussed. This impasse is indirectly expressed by the weakness of social democratic parties in maintaining their electoral clientele and social base of workers, employees, and pensioners. This means that the crisis of social democracy is becoming more permanent. This article attempts to analyze these characteristics.

Friedensmediation findet nicht im rechtsfreien Raum statt, aber vielfach in einem normkritischen oder sogar normaversen Praxisumfeld. Dem wird in diesem Werk gegenübergestellt, dass Rechtskonformität einen Beitrag zu erfolgreicher und legitimer Mediation leistet und dass die Mediation dieser Legitimität auch bedarf, weil sie selbst nachhaltigen Einfluss ausübt. Diesem Legitimationsbedarf kann jedoch ohne die Berücksichtigung rechtlicher Normen nicht Genüge getan werden. Dieser Umstand wird ebenso dargelegt wie die Legitimationsfragen, denen sich rechtliche Normen selbst ausgesetzt sehen und die somit das legitimatorische Potential für die Friedensmediation begrenzen., Peace mediation does not take place in a legal void, but often in a norm-critical or even norm-averse environment. This book contrasts this with the fact that legal conformity contributes to successful and legitimate mediation and that mediation also needs this legitimacy because it itself exerts a lasting influence. However, this need for legitimacy cannot be satisfied without taking legal norms into account. This circumstance is explained, as are the legitimacy issues to which legal norms themselves are exposed and which thus also limit the legitimatory potential for peace mediation.

Traditionally, states were widely believed to be the only institutions claiming political authority. More recently, though, a number of authors have argued that we find various instances of political authority on the international level. We discuss three prominent proposals for conceptualizing international authority: Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore's account of the authority of international bureaucracies, David Lake's extension of 'relational' authority to the international realm, and Michael Zürn's recent proposal for 'reflexive' authority. These authors provide a nuanced and empirically rich picture of hitherto mostly overlooked forms of power in world politics. Yet, we argue that in doing so they lose sight of the distinctly normative character of political authority relations: these relations are built on the explicit normative claim to the right to rule. When such a claim is considered to be justified, authority relations generate content-independent reasons for compliance. Thus understood, authority serves an important function, namely, to facilitate broadly accepted and normatively justified forms of hierarchical coordination. From a normative perspective, therefore, broadening the concept of authority to include various other forms of power deprives us of a critical yardstick against which international organizations should be evaluated. Moreover, it creates a distorted picture of the scope of international authority. Our world is shaped by highly problematic power relations. Yet, in order to meet current challenges of global governance, we need more, not less authority. To illustrate this argument we examine the case of the World Bank, an organization that exercises considerable power while explicitly avoiding any claim to political authority.

This article discusses the International Monetary Fund's recent effort to garner legitimacy by incorporating the reduction of economic inequality in its lending programs. It argues that the impact of the US as a major shareholder on conditionality and geopolitical considerations beyond objective and measurable economic necessities detract from these efforts to expand legitimacy. Using a panel data analysis of International Monetary Fund programs between 1980 and 2013, the article shows that US-allied left-wing governments receive a larger number of labor conditions in their programs compared to non-allied and right-wing governments. The article argues that this is part of left-wing governments' strategy of maintaining their alliance with the US and demonstrating ideological proximity. In exchange, the US uses its influence to secure fewer conditions in total for its allied governments. This not only shifts the burden of adjustment on labor groups but also harms the Fund’s procedural legitimacy, as conditions are not objectively determined. It also has adverse implications for outcome legitimacy by distorting economic policies and outcomes and increasing income inequality.

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.

The article discusses the politicisation of international politics and its effects on the legitimacy of international institutions. It is argued that a more complex understanding of the interplay of institutional and non-institutional practices of resistance is needed and that one has to draw from theories of international relations as well as from approaches from democratic heory to better understand the developments and its effects on the legitimacy of international institutions. The article proceeds by, first, reconstructing how research in IR has responded to the emergence of civil society critique, focusing in particular on the debate about inclusion through liberal governance mechanisms and the discussion of the regulatory power of counter-hegemonic actors in critical theories; it then turns to democratic theoretical approaches, in which the concept of "opposition" becomes a cipher for legitimate critique, yet the value of opposition and its form is determined very differently in different lines of thought. Finally, it is shown that the debate on the politicisation of international relations would particularly benefit from a republican understanding of politics, since the analytical focus and normative impetus lies in the relation between the visibly controversial nature of order and the creation of sites for opinion formation in civil society.