Regime Legitimisation Through Institutional Reform: Analysing its Dimensions and Effectiveness

The adoption of new constitutions in the Arab spring and the changes in Russian institutions after the electoral protests in 2011 and 2012 are two current examples of elites using institutional reforms to address a legitimacy crisis. Academic literature on electoral reforms (Norris, 2011; Katz, 2005) and policy change more generally (Hanberger, 2003; Pierson, 1992) shows that these events form part of a broader strategy of the accommodation of protests and demands for change in (formal) institutional settings. The common elite response to public discontent in both democratic and more hybrid regimes is to change the formal rules of the game. It is unclear, however, to what extent these reforms are actually effective in (re)-establishing regime legitimacy and what the limits of this strategy are. Next to contributing to our substantive understanding of the conditions under which institutional reform leads to regime legitimacy, the aim of this workshop is to create a clearer conceptual distinction between regime legitimacy and legitimization. We invite conceptual papers to elaborate on the central question whether institutional effectiveness (output) in itself constitutes a dimension of legitimacy (Scharpf, 1997, 1999) or whether instead one should rather speak of a cause-effect relationship in which the effectiveness of such reforms contributes to a process of regime legitimization. Although legitimacy is often measured as trust in institutions or political authorities, we also invite empirical paper givers to distinguish between legitimacy as an output specific reaction of citizens on the one hand and as the increase or decrease of the broader “reservoir of favourable attitudes” on the other (Easton, 1975) – thereby contributing to the measurement of legitimization. Comparative papers could add insights into whether similar developments are at work across fully democratic and more hybrid cases, or whether the effect of institutional reform on legitimacy is more context-specific.