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Bridging the normative/sociological divide in the analysis of legitimacy problems: A pragmatic theoretical framework

Governance
Global
International
Normative Theory
Theoretical
Terry Macdonald
University of Melbourne
Terry Macdonald
University of Melbourne

Abstract

The concept of ‘legitimacy’ does not capture any utopian moral ideal of political life; rather, it orients the practical aspirations of participants in political struggles for peaceful and cooperative co-existence through the governing institutions of international order. As a political value embedded in the problems of practice, the idea of ‘legitimacy’ readily straddles normative and sociological fields of political inquiry: normative scholarship analyses its function and justification as a regulative standard for governance institutions; while sociological scholarship analyses the social and psychological processes through which these functions are performed in practice. But the relationships between these normative and sociological analyses remain an ongoing source of theoretical confusion – with significant implications for understandings of the concept, normativity, and institutional functions of global political legitimacy. This paper outlines a pragmatic theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between normative and sociological legitimacy at each of these three levels of analysis, showing how they are related as answers to overlapping questions about how to diagnose and remedy a distinctive family of experienced problems in political practice. In doing so, it helps understand how normative and sociological legitimacy scholars can avoid talking past each other in unfruitful verbal disputes, while enriching each other’s analyses with complementary insights on common political problems.