What Makes Legitimacy Collective? Social Expectations

• In Event: 20207 - Sociological Theory. Contemporary Developments of Classic Themes.

Abstract

Legitimacy is widely understood as being rooted in individual evaluations while also transcending those evaluations to represent a fundamentally collective phenomenon. Yet, there is little consensus regarding what makes legitimacy collective. As a result, multiple incommensurate approaches to conceptualizing the collective dimension of legitimacy have emerged. The purpose of this article is to clarify what makes legitimacy collective. We illustrate how existing approaches to reconciling the individual and collective dimensions of legitimacy introduce both conceptual and theoretical problems. We then build on existing literature to make the case that what makes legitimacy a collective phenomenon is social expectations: frameworks of shared beliefs, norms, and values that define what is or is not legitimate. We show how this conceptualization is both consistent with existing theory and logically coherent. We then detail how attending to social expectations opens exciting new avenues for research into the causes of legitimacy, its consequences, and the dynamics of legitimation and delegitimation.

Authors

• Eric W. Schoon, The Ohio State University

• Steven Bao, The Ohio State University