What Makes Political Authority Legitimate? An Analysis of Ideas about Legitimacy in The Netherlands, France, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and China

Perceived legitimacy is granted to political authorities on the basis of subjective evaluations of these authorities by individuals, various social groups, or elites. Socialization within certain political regime or political culture is believed to affect ‘various orientations toward political matters that one is expected to have…’ (Easton 1975b, pp.397–398). As a result, the criteria used by citizens to assess political authorities and prevailing conceptions of legitimacy are expected to differ across regimes. Scholars indicated that legitimacy of authoritarian regimes is generally based on the (promise of) outputs delivered by the regimes (output legitimacy). Democracies, on the other hand, base their legitimacy mainly on the electoral procedures (input legitimacy). The balance between the input and output legitimacy is not clear in hybrid regimes that mix democratic and autocratic elements in their rule. It is even more difficult to discern what constitutes the basis of legitimacy assessments for citizens in hybrid regimes, than to distil the claims to legitimacy made by the rulers. On the basis of data collected in a student survey, this article compares conceptions of legitimacy in six countries with different political regimes. Students from The Netherlands, and France (old democracies), Poland (new post-communist democracy), Ukraine (post-communist hybrid regime in crisis), Russia (post-communist hybrid regime with growing authoritarian tendencies), and China (communist authoritarian regime) named up to five most important characteristics of legitimate authorities (Nanswers > 6000). Their answers were coded to assess the balance between input, throughput and output criteria used to assess legitimacy and to compare these criteria across regimes.