Perceptions of the Legitimacy of Collective Decisions
Class, Status and Power
Political Power
Abstract
In practical terms, political legitimacy is a subjective phenomenon, based on individuals' perceptions. These perceptions are based on four factors: the distributive efficiency of the outcomes from the decision, the distributive fairness of those outcomes, the equal access of the process used to make the decision, and the accountability of that process. In addition to discussing those factors, I also address the related questions of what factors lead individuals to make legitimacy judgments and the types of situations in which these judgments are most important.
References
-
Beetham, D. (1991). The legitimation of power. New York, NY: Palgrave.
10.1007/978-1-349-21599-7 Google Scholar
- Beetham, D. (1996). Bureaucracy ( 2nd ed.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Berger, J., Ridgeway, C. L., Fisek, M. H., & Norman, R. Z. (1998). The legitimation and delegitimation of power and prestige orders. American Sociological Review, 63, 379–405.
- Bies, R. J., & Sitkin, S. B. (1992). Explanation as legitimation: Excuse-making in organizations. In M. L. Mcaughlin, M. J. Cody & S. J. Read (Eds.), Explaining one's self to others: Reason-giving in a social context (pp. 183–198). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- Bitektine, A., & Haack, P. (2015). The “macro” and the “micro” of legitimacy: Toward a multilevel theory of the legitimacy process. Academy of Management Review, 40(1), 49–75.
- Brockner, J., Ackerman, G., & Fairchild, G. (2001). When do elements of procedural fairness make a difference? A classification of moderating influences. In J. Greenberg & R. Cropanzano (Eds.), Advances in organizational justice (pp. 179–212). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
- Colquitt, J. A., Greenberg, J., & Zapata-Phelan, C. P. (2005). What is organizational justice? A historical overview. In J. Greenberg & J. A. Colquitt (Eds.), Handbook of organizational justice (Vol. 1, pp. 3–58). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- de Fine Licht, J. (2014). Transparency actually: How transparency affects public perceptions of political decision-making. European Political Science Review, 6(02), 309–330.
- De Fine Licht, J., Naurin, D., Esaiasson, P., & Gilljam, M. (2014). When does transparency generate legitimacy? Experimenting on a context-bound relationship. Governance, 27(1), 111–134.
- Deephouse, D. L. (1996). Does isomorphism legitimate? Academy of Management Journal, 39(4), 1024–1039.
-
Della Fave, L. R. (1980). The meek shall not inherit the earth: Self-evaluation and the legitimacy of stratification. American Sociological Review, 45, 955–971.
10.2307/2094912 Google Scholar
- Dickson, E. S., Gordon, S. C., & Huber, G. A. (2015). Institutional sources of legitimate authority: An experimental investigation. American Journal of Political Science, 59(1), 109–127.
- Dornbusch, S. M., & Scott, W. R. (1975). Evaluation and the exercise of authority. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
- Downs, A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. New York, NY: Harper and Row.
- Elsbach, K. D. (1994). Managing organizational legitimacy in the California cattle industry: The construction and effectiveness of verbal accounts. Administrative Science Quarterly, 39(1), 57–88.
- Elsbach, K. D., & Sutton, R. I. (1992). Acquiring organizational legitimacy through illegitimate actions: A marriage of institutional and impression management theories. Academy of Management Journal, 35(4), 699–738.
- Gailmard, S., & Patty, J. W. (2012). Learning while governing: Information, accountability, and executive branch institutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
- Gailmard, S., Patty, J. W., & Penn, E. M. (2008). Arrow's theorem on single-peaked domains. In E. Aragones, H. Llavador & N. Schofield (Eds.), The political economy of democracy. Barcelona, Spain: UAB.
- Gibson, J. L., & Caldeira, G. A. (2009). Confirmation politics and the legitimacy of the US Supreme Court: Institutional loyalty, positivity bias, and the alito nomination. American Journal of Political Science, 53(1), 139–155.
- Gibson, J. L., Caldeira, G. A., & Spence, L. K. (2005). Why do people accept public policies they oppose? Testing legitimacy theory with a survey-based experiment. Political Research Quarterly, 58(2), 187–201.
- Habermas, J. (1979). Communication and the evolution of society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Translated by Thomas McCarthy.
-
Haines, E. L., & Jost, J. T. (2000). Placating the powerless: Effects of legitimate and illegitimate explanation on affect, memory, and stereotyping. Social Justice Research, 13(3), 219–236.
10.1023/A:1026481205719 Google Scholar
-
Johnson, C. (2004). Legitimacy processes in organizations. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier.
10.1016/S0733-558X(2004)22 Google Scholar
- Johnson, C., Dowd, T. J., & Ridgeway, C. L. (2006). Legitimacy as a social process. Annual Review of Sociology, 32, 53–78.
- Jost, J. T., & Banaji, M. R. (1994). The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the production of false consciousness. British Journal of Social Psychology, 33, 1–27.
- Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political psychology, 25, 881–919.
- Landa, D., & Meirowitz, A. (2009). Game theory, information, and deliberative democracy. American Journal of Political Science, 53(2), 427–444.
- Lau, R. R., & Redlawsk, D. P. (2001). Advantages and disadvantages of cognitive heuristics in political decision making. American Journal of Political Science, 45, 951–971.
- Leventhal, G. S., Karuza, J., & Fry, W. R. (1980). Beyond fairness: A theory of allocation preferences. In G. Mikula (Ed.), Justice and social interaction (pp. 167–218). Bern, Switzerland: Hans Huber.
-
Melamed, D. (2012). The effects of legitimacy and power on perceptions of fairness. Sociological Focus, 45(2), 125–142.
10.1080/00380237.2012.657119 Google Scholar
- Mikula, G. (2003). Testing an attribution-of-blame model of judgments of injustice. European Journal of Social Psychology, 33(6), 793–811.
- Patty, J. W. (2008). Arguments-based collective choice. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 20(3), 379–414.
-
Patty, J. W., & Penn, E. M. (2014). Social choice and legitimacy: The possibilities of impossibility. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
10.1017/CBO9781139030885 Google Scholar
-
Patty, J. W., & Penn, E. M. (2015). Aggregation, evaluation, and social choice theory. The Good Society, 24(1), 49–72.
10.5325/goodsociety.24.1.0049 Google Scholar
- Penn, E. M. (2016). Engagement, Disengagement, or Exit: A Theory of Equilibrium Associations. American Journal of Political Science, 60(2), 322–336.
- Penn, E. M., Patty, J. W., & Gailmard, S. (2011). Manipulation and single-peakedness: A general result. American Journal of Political Science, 55(2), 436–449.
- Peter, F. 2014. Political legitimacy. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, (Winter 2014 ed) E.N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=legitimacy.
- Ridgeway, C. L., & Berger, J. (1986). Expectations, legitimation, and dominance behavior in task groups. American Sociological Review, 51, 603–617.
- Ryfe, D. M. (2005). Does deliberative democracy work? Annual Review of Political Science, 8, 49–71.
- Schneider, M., Scholz, J., Lubell, M., Mindruta, D., & Edwardsen, M. (2003). Building consensual institutions: Networks and the National Estuary Program. American Journal of Political Science, 47(1), 143–158.
- Scott, W. R. (1995). Institutions and organizations: Ideas and interests. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications.
- Sitkin, S. B., & Bies, R. J. (1993). Social accounts in conflict situations: Using explanations to manage conflict. Human Relations, 46(3), 349–370.
- Stolte, J. F. (1983). The legitimation of structural inequality: Reformulation and test of the self-evaluation argument. American Sociological Review, 331–342.
- Sutphin, S. T., & Simpson, B. (2009). The role of self-evaluations in legitimizing social inequality. Social Science Research, 38(3), 609–621.
- Thibaut, J. W., & Walker, L. (1975). Procedural justice: A psychological analysis. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates.
- Tost, L. P. (2011). An integrative model of legitimacy judgments. Academy of Management Review, 36(4), 686–710.
- Tyler, T. R. (2001). A psychological perspective on the legitimacy of institutions and authorities. In J. T. Jost & B. Major (Eds.), The psychology of legitimacy: Emerging perspectives on ideology (pp. 416–436). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
- Tyler, T. R. (2006). Psychological perspectives on legitimacy and legitimation. Annual Review of Psychology, 57, 375–400.
- Vaara, E., & Tienari, J. (2008). A discursive perspective on legitimation strategies in multinational corporations. Academy of Management Review, 33(4), 985–993.
- Vaara, E., Tienari, J., & Laurila, J. (2006). Pulp and paper fiction: On the discursive legitimation of global industrial restructuring. Organization Studies, 27(6), 789–813.
- Van der Toorn, J., Tyler, T. R., & Jost, J. T. (2011). More than fair: Outcome dependence, system justification, and the perceived legitimacy of authority figures. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(1), 127–138.
- Weatherford, M. S. (1992). Measuring political legitimacy. American Political Science Review, 86(01), 149–166.
- Weber, M. (1968). Economy and society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations (Vol. 3). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
- Zelditch, M. Jr. & Walker, H. A. (1984). Legitimacy and the stability of authority. Advances in Group Processes, 1, 1–25.
Citing Literature
Browse other articles of this reference work:
