Bargaining for Legitimacy in Dual Legitimacy Systems

• In Event: Federalism in a Comparative Context

Abstract

This paper investigates the quest for legitimacy conducted by hereditary, traditional leaders in dual legitimacy systems, and draws evidence from African democracies. In this paper, we conceptualize and theorize that traditional leaders engage in residual constitutional bargaining, i.e., the bargaining among constitutionally defined actors and within the constitutional framework. This process bears theoretical similarities to that taking place in federations, over the institutional balance between the members and the center, as well as among the members. We thus propose a theoretical parallel between the theory of federal bargaining, on the one hand, and, on the other, the process of adjusting the constitutional balance between the agents in traditional and elected structures of authority in institutional systems with dual legitimacy.

Systems with dual legitimacy exist throughout the world and in countries at a wide range of socio-economic and democratic development. These systems maintain parallel structures with some measure of legislative, executive, and/or judicial prerogatives that are constituted by traditional (tribal) or religious mechanisms, outside of and independent from democratic elected authorities. Dual legitimacy can be maintained at local, sub-national, and even national levels. While often guided by constitutional documents, the exact institutional balance between disjoint authorities operating over the same body of citizens is endogenously maintained in the political process and is not constant. Evidence drawn from cross-national assessments of constitutional protection of chiefly powers (e.g., Baldwin 2016, Ch. 3) and from narratives of the passage of national legislation on chiefly authority (e.g., Krämer 2016; Williams 2009; 2010, Ch. 3) suggests that actors’ strategies in traditional structures are consistent with this framework. The paper contributes to scholarship on political economy, federalism, and chiefly authority.

Authors

• Carol A. Mershon, University of Virginia

• Olga V. Shvetsova, SUNY, Binghamton University