Regulation and Leadership: The Role of Institutional Reform in Legitimising the Executive

In search of good governance practices to be used as models by the expanding number of democratizing states, political legitimacy, or rather the question of ‘what legitimizes power’, has once again taken a central place within political science debate. The question on what defines a regime as legitimate is further burdened by the subtle distinction between legitimacy and legitimation, as well as how to operationalize each of these concepts. In a significant contribution to the legitimacy debate, scholars (Rashkova and Biezen 2013, Casal et al. 2013, Whiteley 2013) examine the link between party regulation and political legitimacy. Building on this research, the current paper explores the role of regulation in legitimizing power. In particular, this project studies how rules endorse leaders. To do this, the paper examines the political regulation of the executive in 33 post-war European democracies and compares the institutional constraints under which executives are to be elected, active, and removed. Besides the empirical contribution, the paper discusses extant measurements of legitimacy and offers a new one which emphasizes the power that regulations give to people to control the executive called the Executive Legitimizing Index (ELI). Some of the indicators considered for building the index are the number of years in office, whether there is an option to impeach, whether the executive veto can be overridden, and whether the executive is chosen by direct election. While the current paper focuses on developing the index both conceptually and empirically, ELI can be applied in future studies that look at effective governance or tools that help achieve it.