Ok, I have not posted for a while and I come out with a nerdy piece. Sorry about that. Hang in there, I will be returning to more case-based matters soon. I needed this one to set up some pieces to follow.
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Most reasonable people in this country think of Adolph Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Josef Stalin in the same vein. Bad men with bad intentions who committed heinous crimes against humanity. Under no circumstances would we think of them, their regimes or their political power, as legitimate. But one of the hallmarks of a legitimate accession to power is via competitive elections. All of these men were elected in some form or another by either popular vote or by vote of the people’s representatives. Hitler is the classic case of abuse of the democratic process to gain power and then set up a dictatorship. Many reasonable and rational Germans were convinced that Hitler’s power was legitimate (at least prior to Stalingrad). We tend to ascribe a universal standard when we use that word to describe something or someone as legitimate. It is a black and white case – someone or something is either legitimate or it is not.
But my research tells me that there is an entirely different way to view this phenomenon of legitimacy. One that is subjective and quite fluid. Legitimated power is in the eyes of the beholder and not based on some universal norm. We Americans like to think in terms of universal norms but clearly there are many that disagree with us when we use terms like democracy, justice and legitimacy. For that matter, we disagree with ourselves (think of the screaming counter parties at your basic tea party vs. lefty event).
OK, strap on your nerd hats. Here is the vocabulary I have derived from many brilliant scholars before me about Legitimacy and legitimated power. This will be a useful backdrop to the pieces that will follow on from this post.
Legitimacy is a form of relational logic by which the subordinate actor chooses to obey a dominant actor absent coercion or immediate payoffs for one’s self interest. In my research, Legitimacy is a source of an actor’s interests in the context of a social exchange.
“A legitimate rule or institution [or organization] is one that has been internalized by the actor’s own sense of its interests and its identity (Hurd 2007:41).”
When power is legitimated it acts as a constraint on the power of the dominant social actor and facilitates a “thick” trust-based social exchange between dominant and subordinate.
Further, legitimated power is:
“Power that provides the grounds for obedience on the part of the subordinate to it, because of the normative force that derives from rules, from the justificatory principles underlying those rules and from actors expressing consent.” (Beetham 1991: 101)… “Legitimacy is the generalized perception or assumption that actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs and definitions” (Suchman 1995: 574)
Although Legitimacy is an inherently normative concept as applied in my research, it is crucial to the operation of large-scale social mobilization whether for good purposes or bad (Hurd 2008:34). Legitimated power can be used by angels and devils alike.