The Legitimation of Political Change - A Framework for Empirical Inquiry

Legitimacy is a prerequisite for lasting political order. To be successful, legitimation (the strategic procurement of legitimacy) has to fulfill two separate functions: relate demands for legitimation to government performance, and relate the legitimacy claims issued by the rulers to behavioural patterns of individual and collective actors. New political regimes and regimes under stress face specific chal-lenges in procuring legitimacy because they often operate under conditions of contested rule and rapid political change. In these cases, providing measures for the ‘amount’ or ‘degree’ of legitimacy at any given point in time (if possible) may not be the most adequate way to assess the success of legitima-tion. The framework presented here parts from the observation that individual political regimes are characterised by a specific mix of legitimation modalities, which shapes their capacity to respond to political change. Situations of regime change are analysed by looking at deviations from these patterns.