Who (De-)Legitimates the UN Security Council?

The United Nations (UN) Security Council has been considered the most powerful supranational organ in the world. But how legitimate is the Council’s power? Thus far we lack a clear understanding of the Council’s legitimacy as research on this topic remains conceptual or theoretical, for the most part. In particular we do not know whether and to what extent states perceive the Council as legitimate or illegitimate and how these perceptions vary across UN members. In order to examine legitimacy perceptions of the Council empirically we have collected over 1,500 evaluative statements made by states in seven UN General Assembly debates on the Council, for the period 1991–2009. In making such statements states confer legitimacy on the Council or withhold legitimacy from it. We find that the Security Council suffers from a legitimacy deficit because negative evaluations of the Council by states far outweigh positive ones. At the same time, the Council does not find itself in an intractable legitimacy crisis because it still enjoys a rudimentary degree of legitimacy. In a second step we employ a Poisson regression model to account for variation in legitimacy perceptions across UN member states. We find that three types of states are more likely to de-legitimate the Council, that is a) states that are targets of Council intervention, b) states with superior economic capacities and c) states which see state sovereignty as a value that should be compromised if humanitarian exigencies so warrant. By contrast, three other types of states are more likely to legitimate the Council (or less likely to de-legitimate it), namely a) the permanent Council members, b) the non-permanent Council members and c) states with interests close to the US.