Conceptual and Methodological Challenges of Comparative Research on Political Legitimacy

The paper will focus on the conceptual and methodological challenges of studying political legitimacy empirically. Political legitimacy and legitimation are among the core topics of political science in general as well as in the subfield of Comparative Politics. But both concepts are essentially contested. Their multidimensional character is often raised, but so far not extensively elaborated upon in the literature. Legitimacy and Legitimation relate to core questions in political science – the relation between rulers and ruled, the properties of a political system, its democratic quality, the rule of law, and its policy output, to name but a few. Moreover, the concept of legitimacy refers to normative and theoretical as well as empirical dimensions of research. Finally, both concepts are linked in a way that is not always conceptually and empirically clear. While legitimacy describes rather the condition of a political system, i.e. the properties and qualities of a polity and the ways they are seen by the citizens, legitimation rather refers to the processes that lead to the creation and the sustainment of legitimacy. Based on this state of the art in the discussion on legitimacy and legitimation, we propose a panel on legitimacy and legitimation in order to discuss theoretical, conceptual, methodical and empirical questions. The paper will discuss main unresolved conceptual and methodological questions, focusing on the different conceptualisations and operationalisations of legitimacy and legitimation and their articulation, and the different research methods and how they could connect.