Examine the conditions that are required for the maintenance of legitimacy in modern societies. (UPSC CSE Mains 2014- Political Science and International Relations, Paper 1)
Legitimacy is commonly defined in political science and sociology as the belief that a rule, institution, or leader has the right to govern. State legitimacy can derive from a range of sources, including:
- Effectiveness of public institutions: the effectiveness of public institutions in their performance of various functions, such as service delivery, taxation, distribution of Justice and social protection systems provides positive attributes to the notion of maintenance of legitimacy.
- Degree of representation and accountability: it reflects the will and confidence of citizens, the more representation and accountable the people’s government will be the more will be its legitimacy.
- Consent of the governed: the most important condition required for maintenance of legitimacy is consent of the governed, as it is the ultimate way that makes Political authorities legitimate in the eyes of citizens.
- Sociological equations: the society and its consensus is the only source that decides the source and center of legitimacy and its Dynamics as in the modern democratic era the people decide.
- Input and output factors: Input legitimacy in his connotation is about legitimacy gained from the process of government, government by the people, while output legitimacy is gained from the result, government for the people, so balance between both input and output variables of input and output legitimacy is essential.
Jurgen Habermas, while underlining the class-exploitative basis of modern societies, pointed out that liberal democracies possess the means of drawing support from the people through democratic mechanisms. These, however, while aiming at legitimisation, also stir up popular pressures for increased state intervention in social sectors. The contradictory pulls between pressures for democratisation (legitimisation) and capitalist accumulation, make liberal (capitalist) democracies ridden by the legitimisation crisis. Liberal democracies try to overcome these crisis tendencies by taking recourse to ‘steering measures’ i.e., decoupling the economy from the political sphere, making the political sphere less participatory and more impersonal and bureaucratic, and holding the system together ideologically through ‘universalist’ discourses of rights, citizenship and justice.
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