The legitimacy of international institutions is a contested issue both in terms of concept formation and empirical evidence that attracts attention from across the political sciences. The present contribution posits a relational concept of legitimacy that includes self-justification of rulers on the one hand, and legitimacy beliefs of the ruled on the other. By taking a top-down perspective, we focus on legitimacy claims of political elites as part of their daily political life, our conceptual section explores an underdeveloped aspect in the field of legitimacy research. We posit that the analysis of political elites’ self-legitimations can considerably contribute to our understanding of governing activities and provide a more thorough picture of legitimation processes. These practices play a key role in transforming mere power into popularly accepted, stable authority and have an essentially communicative nature. Hence, self-legitimations are amenable to discourse analysis. In this conjunction, the paper assumes that the media functions as a discursive battleground creating a space for positive or negative evaluations of political orders, including affirmative contributions of the representatives of challenged organizations themselves. The conceptual and theoretical link between legitimacy, self-legitimizing practices, and discourse analysis is further developed in the first section of the paper. Subsequently, our conceptualization of self-legitimizing practices is empirically exemplified. We examine self-legitimating statements of representatives of three major international organizations (EU, G8, and UN) in media discourses and probe how, if at all, and on the basis of which normative foundations holders of international political offices attempt to legitimate their respective organizations in public debates. Our explorative study is based on a large qualitative data-set which analyzes legitimacy discourses in two high-quality newspapers in four Western democracies (GB, USA, D, and CH) over a period of ten years (1998-2007).
