Legitimation from the Top – Analysing International Institutions’ Self-Legitimations

Abstract

Transnational protests and critical media debates indicate that international institutions have increasingly become the object of legitimacy assessments in the broader public. In order to cope with the alleged legitimacy deficits of international governance, these challenged institutions engage in various forms of self-legitimation. Yet, empirical legitimacy research has so far largely neglected the role of legitimacy claims made by international institutions and their efforts to legitimize themselves. By proposing to study the self-legitimation of international institutions this panel seeks to bring together research that scrutinizes the means by which international institutions try to establish and maintain a reliable basis of diffuse support. Self-legitimations can be analyzed on the level of (verbal or non-verbal) discourses scrutinizing the meanings of legitimacy and structure of legitimacy claims made by international institutions or on the level of practices, i.e. on more substantive forms of behavioral adaptation and change, including institutional reforms (introduction of transparency regimes, accountability measures, procedures to include civil society organizations), communication policies, and efforts to improve the performance of international institutions. The aim of the panel is to generate conceptual and methodological clarifications with respect to the analysis of self-legitimations, to discuss a variety of different empirical approaches to the self-legitimation of international institutions and to gain first comparative insights on the similarities and differences of international institutions’ efforts to legitimize themselves.