The bulk of empirical research on legitimacy is concerned with the measurement of regime support drawing on public opinion research. This, however, is ill-suited to capture the actual discursive practices through which legitimacy is established or negated. Legitimation is about the evaluation of political orders or institutions on the basis of normative – for instance, democratic – criteria; regimes are judged as normatively acceptable or not. Such assessments are made in various settings – most importantly in the general public via statements that are reported in the media. Empirical research of these (de-)legitimating discourses has broadened or knowledge about the mechanisms of asserting and denying legitimacy well beyond the assumptions of theories of political legitimacy. But the complex interplay of multiple political actors who use specific arguments to legitimize or delegitimize political orders and institutions over time has brought existing discourse-analytical methods tho their limits. The aim of my paper is to demonstrate the specific advantages of a discourse network analytical framework. I examine legitimation discourses in the quality press of four Western democracies (Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, United States) between 1998 and 2007. Discourse network analysis enables me to identify discourse coalitions, as well as argumentative dynamics in the evaluation of various regime elements, without a priori assumptions about cooperative relationships between specific actors, but based on argumentative patterns shared between actors over time. The structure of the discourse networks reveals idiosyncrasies of the four political systems and general patterns of democratic and non-democratic legitimation across countries and across time. Drawing on my data I will discuss a network-analytical indicator to measure deliberative discourse quality, and present some thoughts about the limits of 2-mode data to capture discursive interaction.
