Text
E-book Global Legitimacy Crises : Decline and Revival in Multilateral Governance
Legitimacy is a common theme in political and social research. It is conventionallyseen to play a fundamental role in any political system. Discussions of what it doesto social and political life have occupied deep minds in sociology, philosophy, andpolitical science.¹ Yet the most commonly stated reason to care about legitimacy inpolitical analysis comes down to a belief about its effects. Legitimacy as the right torule, perceived by a relevant audience, is thought to affect the capacity to rule, andit enables political institutions to effectively address real world problems, at the do-mestic as well as the international level (e.g.,Ruggie, 1982;Franck, 1990;Beetham,1991;Buchanan and Keohane, 2006;Hurd, 2007;Dellmuth and Tallberg, 2015;Lenz and Viola, 2017). The same idea applies even more naturally to explain theopposite, less fortunate situation, namely, that an institution is attempting to rulewithout having any publicly discernible right to do so. Such a crisis in the legiti-macy of an institution is key to explaining, in the words of a landmark contributionin the field: “the erosion of power relations, and those dramatic breaches of socialand political order that occur as riots, revolts, and revolutions.” For as the sameauthor explains a moment later: “it is only when legitimacy is absent that we canfully appreciate its significance when it is present, and where it is so often takenfor granted” (Beetham, 1991, p. 6).With the prominence of this claim in mind and all thinking subsumed by it, wecould embark on a large-scale empirical research project on legitimacy in mul-tilateral governance only with a significant amount of humility. Our rationalewas simply to cover an empirical field that had been neglected in previous re-search. Since the end of the Cold War, international organizations (IOs) havebeen increasingly empowered to overcome the limits of nation-states when itcomes to solving transboundary problems such as climate change, monitoring andsanctioning human rights violations, fostering development in the Global South,and promoting democracy. This empowerment has been matched by a growing interest in legitimacy among scholars of multilateral governance in recent years.While advancing the understanding of the sources and dynamics of legitimacy atthe international level, this scholarship, however, has not provided any sufficientlylarge-scale empirical study to effectively test the effects of legitimacy.
Tidak tersedia versi lain