Disentangling Legitimacy: Towards A Taxonomy Of Legitimacy States

Abstract

In this paper, we advance the understanding of legitimacy by exploring the different states of legitimacy that could typify an actor at a given moment in time and the conclusions that can be drawn from that state that will guide the process to enhance or sustain legitimacy in the eyes of evaluators. We extend theory by 1) drawing attention to the presence of intermediate states of legitimacy and challenge the implicit notion of legitimacy as a dichotomous variable, 2) clarifying the notions of the object and the state of legitimacy, and 3) proposing a taxonomy of legitimacy states. We apply this taxonomy to a hypothetical data set and review a series of conceivable judgment distributions. In doing so, we identify two alternative states of legitimacy: polarized legitimacy and uniform distributed judgments. We finish this paper with a series of conclusions, discuss their implications for theory and practice and suggest avenues for further research.

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