Construct · 6 fields · 10 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one name, six constructs Nearest construct by meaningprocedural justicecompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to legitimacy is procedural justice.
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A regime is legitimate to the extent that those subject to it believe it has the right to command, and Weber classified the grounds of that belief as traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational. Easton turned belief into a measurable reservoir, diffuse support, a generalized attachment to the political community and regime that persists through dissatisfaction with particular outputs, as distinct from specific support for a government or policy. The construct is empirical: it asks what people believe, not what they ought to.[1][2]
Political power is legitimate when its exercise can be justified to those bound by it, for Rawls, when it accords with a constitution whose essentials all citizens could reasonably be expected to endorse. Beetham objected that Weber's belief criterion collapses legitimacy into public relations and reconstructed it as three conditions: conformity to rules, justifiability of the rules by shared beliefs, and expressed consent. On either account the question is whether authority deserves obedience, and no survey can answer it.[3][4]
Legal scholarship separates three things the word carries: legal legitimacy, whether an act is authorized by valid law; sociological legitimacy, whether the relevant public accepts it; and moral legitimacy, whether it deserves respect. Fallon's analysis of constitutional legitimacy showed that the three come apart routinely (a decision can be lawful and widely rejected, or accepted and unlawful) and that arguments about courts often switch meanings mid-sentence. The field's contribution is the insistence that legality is one criterion among three, not the whole.[5]
A property of an authority that leads people to feel they ought to defer to its decisions and rules voluntarily, apart from rewards and punishments. Tyler's finding is that this feeling tracks the perceived fairness of procedures (voice, neutrality, respect, trustworthy motives) more than the favorability of outcomes. The construct lives in the individual, is measured by self-report, and predicts compliance and cooperation with police, courts, and managers.[6][7]
A social judgment of acceptance and desirability that a new venture must earn before resource holders will deal with it, the missing ingredient behind the liability of newness. Zimmerman and Zeitz treated legitimacy as a resource in its own right, gained through conformity, selection of environments, manipulation, and creation, and proposed a threshold below which a venture cannot grow. The unit is a firm that does not yet have a track record, and the outcome is survival.[8]
A generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions. Suchman fixed that sentence in 1995 and sorted the literature into pragmatic, moral, and cognitive legitimacy and into strategic versus institutional views of how it is managed. Meyer and Rowan supplied the mechanism: organizations adopt formal structures as ceremony, because conformity to rationalized myths brings legitimacy and resources regardless of efficiency.[9][10]
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