Normative and empirical approaches to legitimacy

There have been two fundamentally different approaches to legitimacy in scientific research, namely those with a normative-prescriptive and those with an empirical-descriptive focus. Depending on the research interest, a scholar might ask whether a

certain order, institution, rule or actor is consistent with a set of appropriate criteria of legitimacy established ex ante; she might in turn also examine whether a certain community considers a certain order, institution, rule or actor to be legitimate, and which are the prevalent criteria of acceptability. Hence, while a scholar interested in normative questions asks under which conditions governance deserves to be considered legitimate, a scholar focusing on empirical aspects enquires why those persons subject to a governance arrangement accept and support it in in reality (Steffek 2003: 253).

Depending on the approach chosen, research strategies thus vary considerably.

Therefore, in the next step empirical and normative approaches will be presented and compared.

When taking a normative approach, the social scientist in a first step establishes and defends a set of criteria of legitimacy as a normative benchmark, and then applies them to the political order, institution or authority she intends to evaluate. As a result, a scholar makes normative statements about the overall quality of the evaluated object (Hurrelmann et al. 2007b: 3); the adjective ‘legitimate’ is applied to the object of evaluation if it concords with the pre-established rules and principles. In this regard, moral principles taken to evaluate a certain institution often embody a generalizing claim to universal validity as it is assumed that any rational person would have to agree to them upon rational and informed reflection (Beetham 1991: 5). Other scholars have suggested that normative approaches to legitimacy need to take the historical context and social structure into account. This approach argues that the needs and beliefs of societies change, which should be reflected in legitimacy assessments. In short, for a scholar employing a normative approach to legitimacy, the tasks consists in a) philosophically deducing normative sound criteria that either claim universal validity or relevance for the respective context and b) assessing whether a certain institution or political order is consistent with these criteria. Disputes over legitimacy thus may be characterized by different interpretations on what constitutes adequate criteria of evaluation, or by disputes of whether an object conforms to some type of standard.

In research on empirical legitimacy, on the contrary, the social scientist does not establish normative criteria of what constitutes legitimate governance ex ante, but makes the prevalent norms of the relevant community the benchmark for legitimacy evaluation. She analyses which criteria of acceptability are used by real-world actors, and how. Legitimacy is thus conceptualized as a social fact (Steffek 2003: 253).

Empirical work on legitimacy often draws on the work of Max Weber (1947: 122) who famously understood legitimacy as Legitimitätsglaube (belief in legitimacy). Hence, when taking an empirical approach, the objects of study are perceptions of the rightfulness of a political order. A certain order, institution or authority is deemed legitimate if the members of the relevant constituency perceive it to be rightful und justifiable according to their (individual) perceptions and judgements. Thus, a scholar taking an empirical approach to legitimacy has to a) observe individual expressions of legitimacy and b) aggregate them to come to conclusions as regards the legitimacy of the relevant order, institution or authority.

However, the difficulty consists in observing and measuring expressions of legitimacy.

Scholars interested in empirical legitimacy have sometimes equated it with the terms support or acceptance and compliance. Although they include legitimacy, these concepts are broader. On the one hand, the support or acceptance of a political order can be based either on legitimacy (i.e. normative evaluations) or on other types of assessment such as rational calculations of self-interest or prudence in face of coercion. These mechanisms, though, only lead to the acceptance of authority in the presence of incentives or threats (Steffek 2003: 254). On the other hand, compliance is what results from support and legitimacy. It has been argued that compliance is more durable if underpinned by moral reasons, i.e. legitimacy (Beetham 1991: 28). Hence, empirical legitimacy is a specific type of reason for acceptance or support, and compliance is the empirical phenomenon that we can observe. From the simple observation of compliance we thus cannot conclude that rule addressees hold legitimacy beliefs (Steffek 2003: 254–255). Nonetheless, it has to be admitted that in empirical research acceptance and legitimacy are often difficult to distinguish, and in the end interpretation may rely on the researcher (Hurrelmann et al.

2007b: 7–8). Disputes over legitimacy in this context thus may be characterized by different positions regarding the interpretation of legitimacy expressions.

Another mayor difficulty with regard to empirical legitimacy concerns the fact that we can only observe legitimation by individual actors, based on individual evaluations of the institutional features of the legitimated object. However, legitimacy concerns the accordance between institutional features and collectively held norms and values. Thus, to make any conclusion as regards the legitimacy of a specific institution, the researcher must aggregate individual perceptions and evaluations.

In a nutshell, there are two different research strategies for determining legitimacy (see Table2). On the one hand, a scholar might through philosophical reasoning deduce the criteria that should be relevant to an assessment of the legitimacy of a specific object. He then poses his individual perceptions of justifiability at the center of his research.

However, this approach often entails the claim in that the norms which are deduced by philosophical reasoning are shared (or should be shared) by a relevant constituency. On the other hand, a scholar may base his legitimacy research on individual beliefs and perceptions of legitimacy by members of the relevant constituency to find out which are the criteria that are in fact used to assess the legitimacy of a specific object. Their individual opinions are aggregated to allow for conclusions regarding the overall legitimacy of an institution.

Approach to

legitimacy Focus of research Research strategy Collective element of legitimacy is taken Table 2: Comparison between normative and empirical approaches to legitimacy. Source: author’s elaboration.

However, I argue together with Brassett and Tsingou (2011: 5) that “a stark distinction between normative and sociological legitimacy is no more than an analytical device”.

Political philosophers who work on normative legitimacy do themselves take part in societal legitimation, and they may contribute with their arguments to the (de)legitimation of authority. Normative scientific discourse can be understood as part of a legitimation process that influences empirical legitimacy (Føllesdal 2007: 220). The distinction between normative and empirical approaches thus points to the fact that

“social scientists, or other political actors, can be both authors and observers of legitimacy evaluations” (Barker 2007: 20–21; see also Hurrelmann et al. 2007b: 3).

Moreover, one might assume that the reasons of communities for accepting an institution, actor or a rule as legitimate probably overlap to a significant degree with those normative arguments and justifications that highlight why these institutions, actors or rules deserve morally grounded support (Bernstein 2011: 20). In other words, empirical legitimacy and normative convincing reasons stand in a close relationship to

each other. Therefore, results obtained by one research strategy may serve to counter-check and complement results obtained by the other approach.⁴⁴