Measuring Legitimacy – New Trends, Old Shortcomings?

Some scholars use legitimacy as a concept to explain the stability or transformation of political orders. Even with a rapidly expanding body of academic research on legitimacy, however, the concept has proven to be stubbornly elusive regarding its operationalization and measurement. This is especially true for cases that are particularly interesting in terms of legitimacy research: countries undergoing rapid political change or suffering from extended periods of fragility and conflict. This paper holds that the academic debate on the subject has so far failed to present truly convincing approaches to address these problems. As a result, attempts to empirically assess legitimacy have been spoiled with two basic shortcomings: Either they have measured only specific types of legitimacy (such as for instance the Western model of democratic rule of law), or they have measured only specific aspects of the concept (such as for instance the attitudes of citizens). The paper presents an alternative approach to the operationalisation and measurement of legitimacy, based on four dimensions: (i) attitudes, (ii) performance, (iii) inclusion and (iv) behaviour.