1

The Irrelevance of Legitimacy1

Xavier Marquez
Senior Lecturer, Political Science and International Relations Programme
PO Box 600
Victoria University of Wellington
Wellington, New Zealand
64-4-463-5889
marquez.x@gmail.com or Xavier.marquez@vuw.ac.nz
Abstract
Both popular and academic explanations of the stability, performance, and breakdown of political order
make heavy use of the concept of legitimacy. But prevalent understandings of the idea of legitimacy,
while perhaps useful and appropriate ways of making sense of the political world in ordinary public
discourse, cannot play the more rigorous explanatory roles with which they are tasked in the social
sciences. To the extent that the concept of legitimacy appears to have some explanatory value, this is
only because explanations of social and political order that appeal to legitimacy in fact conceal widely
different (and often inconsistent) accounts of the mechanisms involved in the production of obedience
to authority and submission to norms. I suggest in this paper that explanatory social science would be
better off abandoning the coarse concept of legitimacy for more precise accounts of the operation of
these mechanisms in particular contexts.

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2011 NZPSA meeting in Dunedin and at the 2012 MPSA
meeting in Chicago. I wish to thank especially Steve Winter, Kathy Smits, David Thunder, Peter Koritansky, Vicki
Spencer and other participants in these panels for comments. Many bits and pieces of the argument of this paper
were first hashed out in my blog (http://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com); these benefitted greatly from
discussions there and elsewhere.

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2027249

Both popular and academic explanations of the stability, performance, and breakdown of
political order make heavy use of the concept of legitimacy. The persistence and breakdown of
autocracies, including the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union
(Burnell 2006; Kalyvas 1999; Holmes 1993) and China (Gilley 2008); political crises in liberal
democratic states (Habermas 1975) and their breakdown elsewhere (Linz 1978); the rise of
populist movements (Doyle 2011); the general phenomenon of revolution (Goldstone 2001);
and the persistence of relations of domination across a wide range of domains (Beetham 1992;
Weber 1978 [1922]; Beetham 2013), from highly coercive environments like prisons (Tyler
2010) to settings where few coercive mechanisms exist to enforce norms, like international
society (Clark 2005); these are all phenomena whose explanation has often relied on the idea of
legitimacy. Though occasional doubts have been raised about the utility of the concept (O'Kane
1993; Pakulski 1986), and at least some rationalist accounts of political order typically downplay
or even completely eschew the notion of legitimacy (Przeworski 2005; Greif and Laitin 2004), it
is fair to say the idea of legitimacy continues to play a large role in both explanatory and
normative accounts of political order (Gilley 2009, 2006b, 2006a; Simmons 2001; Hechter 2009;
Booth and Seligson 2009). Public discourse is full of references not only to the legitimacy of
political actions and orders but also to the legitimating activities of political actors; the need to
acquire or retain legitimacy is commonly used to frame stories about political action; and
almost everyone believes that political orders ought to be legitimate.
This paper argues that prevalent understandings of the idea of legitimacy, while perhaps useful
and appropriate ways of making sense of the political world in ordinary public discourse, cannot
play the more rigorous explanatory roles with which they are tasked in the social sciences. To

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2027249

the extent that legitimacy appears relevant to accounts of social and political order, it is
typically because it works as a residual concept that bundles together many different and
sometimes contradictory explanatory mechanisms. But to the extent that legitimacy is not a
purely residual concept, it will be mostly irrelevant to social explanation, since it will refer to
only one of many potential mechanisms that account for social and political order in terms of
the human ability to recognize and act in accordance with authority norms.
My argument is grounded in a distinction between narrow and broad conceptions of
legitimacy.2 The narrow conception of legitimacy, which I trace back to Webers seminal
discussion of legitimate orders in Economy and Society (Weber 1978 [1922]), identifies a very
specific mechanism for the stability and maintenance of social and political order, namely, the
internalization of the public justifications of such orders by those subject to them. But, I show,
explanations that rely on narrow conceptions of legitimacy cannot account for the
maintenance of relationships of domination in a wide variety of cases, as even Weber admitted.
We might then then wish to appeal to a broad conception of legitimacy, which we can use to
explain the stability of social and political orders not by appealing to the internalization of their
public justifications, but by pointing to the social recognition of (and hence credible
commitments to) the social norms justifying them. Yet, I argue, such explanations, also found
embryonically in Webers account of legitimate orders, do not identify a single mechanism that
can generate credible commitments to norms, but several such mechanisms, with diverse and
even contradictory implications for understanding the stability, performance, and breakdown
of social and political order. I therefore suggest that explanatory social science would be better
2

I owe the narrow vs. broad terminology to an anonymous reviewer of this paper.

off abandoning the broad conception of legitimacy for more precise accounts of the operation
of the mechanisms underlying social and political order in particular contexts, while reserving
the term legitimacy for the specific (and, in my view, rare) cases in which particular relations
of domination or other forms of social order are in fact sustained via the internalization of their
public justifications. This suggestion has the additional merit of pushing the normative and
explanatory accounts of legitimacy closer together, insofar as legitimate political orders (in the
narrow sense) are sustained by the acceptance and internalization of publicly acknowledged
reasons, just as normative accounts of legitimacy suggest (Cf. Beetham 1993, p. 490).
The papers argumentative strategy is as follows. I begin with a discussion of why the idea of
legitimacy has been thought necessary to the explanation of the stability, performance, and
breakdown of political and social order, even though the results of empirical studies of its
relevance over the long run have often been ambiguous or disappointing. I then clarify the
meaning of the concept as typically used in social explanation, showing that the key question
for an explanation that appeals to legitimacy concerns the way in which the reasons provided in
a discourse of justification operate to sustain particular authority norms. Explanations of social
and political order that appeal to a narrow view of legitimacy, specifically, require that actors
take over public reasons justifying these norms as their private reasons for action. I then argue
that this narrow conception of legitimacy cannot account for many interesting cases of social
and political order, motivating the introduction of a broader conception of legitimacy that
merely demands that in legitimate orders the public justifications for the norms governing
interaction should be seen as valid. But, as I go on to explore in the next to last section of the
paper, the validity of the norms governing legitimate orders in this broader sense can be

underpinned by a wide variety of mechanisms ranging from epistemic deficits to coordination

dilemmas to framing effects. More importantly, these mechanisms have different implications
for the stability of social and political orders, and are thus not equivalent for social explanation.
In a concluding section, I argue that discourses of justification are nevertheless extremely
important in politics, not so much because they legitimate relationships of domination, but
because they serve as a language for signalling credible commitments to the norms governing
these relationships.

Why Legitimacy?
The key (but not the only) problem addressed by the notion of legitimacy has to do with the
nature of relations of power and domination, which are characteristic of all complex social
orders. These are asymmetrical relations where one party (the dominant) has an incentive to
prevent the other party (the dominated) from exiting the relationship or meaningfully
altering its terms, i.e., from resisting it, while the other party has a contrary incentive. While
such relationships can be sustained by repression or material incentives (which affect the shortterm interest calculations of the dominated regarding the possibilities of entering into
alternative relationships or changing the terms of the current one), the assumption since
Weber has been that such external incentives cannot by themselves induce sufficient levels of
long-run cooperation on the part of the dominated at reasonable cost to the dominant. This is
because human beings are motivated not merely by extrinsic rewards and punishments, but
also by normative considerations (Dubreuil 2010); and to that extent, we will, ceteris paribus,
more easily follow rules and accept roles that can be justified to us in normative terms.

The concept of legitimacy is thus typically used to explain how a relationship of domination (or
indeed any relationship which some participants have incentives to exit, regardless of whether
or not the relationship can be properly characterized as a form of domination) can be
maintained in ways that economize on violence and material rewards (Matheson 1987, p. 200;
Hechter 2009; Tyler 2006a, pp. 376-377). The explanation must indicate both the claim the
dominant make to their position over the dominated (their legitimating formula, which
answers the question, why should the dominant have power over the dominated?) and the
degree to which this claim is accepted by the dominated and comes to motivate their
commitment to the relationship between both parties. Legitimacy is, on this view,
institutionalized persuasion: it describes relationships in which the dominant make use or take
advantage of certain shared or public normative discourses to justify their position and
authority to the dominated, and the dominated generally find such justifications persuasive
enough to motivate continuing commitments to these relationships, net of non-discursive
incentives to remain in or comply with the terms of the relationship (like access to economic
resources or credible threats of physical coercion).3 To the extent that shared modes of
justification are not found persuasive by the subordinate (and hence are motivationally inert),
explanations of relationships of domination based on legitimacy will fail. 4

Though the distinction between discursive justifications and non-discursive incentives is not always clear in
specific cases, a discursive justification is both public and appeals to moral or other normative considerations,
whereas a non-discursive incentive appeals to private considerations of interest (Grant 2006). See also the section
on Weber below.
4
It is worth noting, however, that a great deal of legitimating discourse in many political orders is not directed at
subordinates but at members of dominant groups, indeed sometimes at a very narrow slice of such groups (Barker
2001).

Successful explanations that appeal to legitimacy should thus point to the ways in which
particular relationships are structured by reference to publicly identifiable norms that are
acknowledged by subordinate participants as motivationally relevant or valid. Two distinct
types of norms are important here: authority norms identifying who can issue commands or
which rules are to be followed in the context of the relationship in question (e.g., norms
specifying which persons count as officials and which rules are legal rules that ought to be
obeyed) and evaluative norms identifying the standards (e.g., fairness or moral norms) the
persons or rules identified by authority norms must meet in order to remain legitimate or
authoritative (e.g., for their commands to be obeyed with high probability even in the
absence of alternative, non-discursive incentives). Explaining a relationship in terms of
legitimacy involves showing that the subordinate consider a particular authority norm valid
because the authorities in question make a credible claim to meet the standards of publicly
relevant evaluative norms, for example by deploying appropriate discursive justifications for
their actions or acting in ways that are interpretable as falling within shared normative
standards.5
Explanations based on legitimacy are thus not agnostic about the mechanism through which
authority and evaluative norms become motivationally relevant (valid) for subordinates. 6
More specifically, they typically claim that the motivation underlying action in accordance with
authority norms on the part of subordinates (including, on occasion, helping to enforce such
norms against others; cf. Horne 2009) itself stems from normative considerations, rather than
5

Subordinates who hold the relevant authority norms valid may also be more likely to obey the dominant even if
they (occasionally) violate relevant evaluative norms.
6
For more on the importance of identifying mechanisms in social explanation, see Elster (2007); Tilly (2008).

from material or other non-discursive incentives. For example, Tyler (2006b); (2010) argues that
people are more likely to obey the law and cooperate with the police when they internalize
norms of authority that identify the law as a set of rules that ought to be obeyed and the police
as having a right to direct ones conduct in accordance with their interpretations of these rules,
and they are more likely to internalize these norms when they interpret the actions of the
police (and the legal process more generally) to be in accord with norms of procedural fairness
they believe in, and evaluate the outcome induced by obeying the law as falling within
recognizable moral limits they endorse. Tylers account stresses the key role of the beliefs
underlying these authority and evaluative norms in the specific mechanism motivating
subordinate individuals to cooperate with the police or obey the law, and indeed distinguishes
this mechanism not only from deterrence (a non-discursive incentive) but also from peer
effects, personal morality, and evaluations of the extent to which citizens felt their interests
were being furthered by authorities.
A comparable account of the legitimacy of states as complex systems of relationships of
domination is given by Gilley (2006b), following the work of Beetham (1992), discussed in more
detail below. On Gilleys view, a state is considered legitimate by a population to the extent
that a population believes in an authority norm that grants it the exclusive right to use political
power; and citizens believe the state has this right to the extent that it acts in accordance with
both other widely acknowledged authority norms (legally), and widely endorsed evaluative
norms (pursues public purposes that credibly justify its actions). As long as states act within
the constraints of these authority and evaluative norms, citizens will thus produce acts of
consent in ordinary life (cooperation with officials, obedience to laws, etc.). Individual beliefs in

these specific norms (measured both via the attitudes citizens reveal in public opinion surveys
and in their acts of consent towards the state) thus play a key role in the mechanism that Gilley
assumes makes authority norms about state power (legitimacy) motivationally effective for
citizens.
The importance of normative beliefs for legitimacy explanations means that the empirical
literature typically attempts to trace links between individual normative attitudes and the
stability or performance of political and social orders (Booth and Seligson 2009, chapter 1; Tyler
2006a; Jost and Major 2001). Yet though individual studies often find links between legitimacy
as measured by attitudes expressed in surveys and institutional change and stability (for some
examples, see Rose, Mishler, and Munro 2011; Gilley 2008; Power and Cyr 2009), effects are
often small,7 and the evidence that measured opinion has a big impact on the stability of large
political and social orders over the long run is limited. As Booth and Seligson (2009, p. 3) note,
If institutional legitimacy has indeed declined so much in recent decades, why have we
not by now observed at least a few breakdowns of established democracies, or more
frequent and widespread protests directed at them? And why do even the newer
democracies, with significantly worse performance than developed democracies, appear
to enjoy strong popular support?
A number of solutions to this puzzle have been proposed. Booth and Seligson, for example,
suggest that the problem lies primarily in the lack of good measures of legitimacy, which could
7

For example, in Tylers landmark 1990 study of why people obey the law (Tyler 2006b), only about 2% of the
variance in compliance was explained by legitimacy properly speaking (p. 60). And although much research since
(noted in the afterword to the 2006 edition) confirms the importance of normative motivations for compliance
with the law and deference to authorities, the specific explanatory power of measures of legitimacy remains low.

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presumably be improved by better measurement techniques and improved datasets of the kind
that they and others (notably Gilley 2006b, 2012) have attempted to produce. Other
researchers (e.g., Norris 2011, chapter 2; as well as Booth and Seligson 2009) point not only to
measurement problems, but also to conceptual confusion regarding different dimensions of
legitimacy; Booth and Seligson in particular attempt to distinguish among the different objects
of legitimacy (the nation, regime principles, regime institutions, regime performance as
evaluated from a sociotropic perspective, local government, specific political actors) and to
identify which of these is most important for explaining the persistence of political and social
order. And arguably much empirical work neglects to control for private incentives and coercion
when testing the effects of legitimacy on institutional change and stability. But my purpose
here is not to delve into these sophisticated debates about the measurement of legitimacy or
its manifold dimensions, but to argue that the concept cannot truly bear the empirical weight
placed upon it because of its dependence on an undertheorized conception of belief in
particular norms.

Weberian Legitimacy and its Discontents

The problem goes back to Max Webers original discussion of legitimacy in Economy and
Society. The clarity and rigor of Webers presentation, as well as its influence on subsequent
accounts of legitimacy, makes his views worth discussing in some detail, especially since he is
forced to concede that a narrow conception of legitimacy, grounded in a specific belief
mechanism (the internalization of norms), is insufficient to explain actual relationships of

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domination.8 At any rate, Weber shows that the key question for legitimacy explanations
concerns the way in which the reasons provided in a discourse of justification enable action in
accordance with certain norms.
Webers discussion of legitimacy may be best understood as an attempt to explain how the
different ways in which people understand their reasons for action give rise to and disrupt
different patterns of social action (social orders). According to him, there are only three kinds
of social order:
1. In habitual orders, patterns of social action emerge and are kept in existence through
the unthinking inertia of everyday activity (habitual action); reasons do not play a
motivating role in their creation. Such orders are not stable, however, to the
introduction of reflection; when people think about what they are doing, they may act
differently, transforming their forms of interaction into interest-based or legitimate
orders.
2. In interest-based orders (such as ideal-typical markets), social regularities emerge from
the mutual adjustment of the activities of more or less instrumentally rational actors
engaging in tactical and strategic activity in pursuit of their various interests. Reasons
here play a motivating role in the emergence of social regularities, but only privately:
each actor has his or her own (different) reasons for acting as he or she does in pursuit
of his or her interests, yet social regularities still emerge from the private adjustments

My interpretation of Weber draws on Habermas discussion in The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas
1984 [1981]), especially I.ii.1, pp.157-185 and I.ii.4, pp. 254-271; the relevant passages of Weber are mostly
in Economy and Society I.i, especially sections 4-6.

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each actor makes to his or her behaviour in light of the actions of others. In modern
game-theoretic terms, the social order is the equilibrium of some game, emerging from
the participants (potentially heterogeneous) private reasons for action. Weber thinks,
however, that pure interest-based orders are generally unstable, and are thus often
stabilized by what we might call shared or public reasons, which transform interestbased orders into legitimate orders properly speaking.
3. In legitimate orders social regularities emerge from the shared acceptance by agents of
certain reasons for action or inaction. These reasons are usually understood as
normative constraints on the kinds of actions that agents might privately consider, such
as for example beliefs about the validity, justice, fairness, or virtue of particular actions
or norms. Here reasons produce social regularities not through their being held privately
(as in interest-based orders) but through their being shared or public reasons that can
rule out of bounds or override, so to speak, certain kinds of private reasons for action.
Weber identifies three basic ideal types of legitimate order: the traditional order, where the
legitimating reasons refer to the supposed naturalness of an institution; the charismatic order,
where the legitimating reasons refer to the special qualities of a person or persons from whom
rules issue; and the legal-rational order, where the legitimating reasons refer to the special
qualities of a set of rules (which can themselves be used to generate further rules). In each of
these orders, submission to authority occurs according to distinctive legitimating formulas that
indicate what we might call the expected answer to the question of why one should obey.
Thus, in legal-rational orders the expected answer to that question is, roughly, because the

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(duly enacted) rules authorize it; in traditional orders the expected answer is because that is
the way things are done around here, and our traditions are sacred; and in charismatic orders
the expected answer is because the leader says so, and he/she is special. These constitute the
(public) reasons for obedience, i.e. the (public) justifications for authority norms in each of
these orders, and Weber thinks that they can play an explanatory role in accounting for their
persistence and stability.
This characterization of the types of legitimacy has been subject to severe critical scrutiny,
since there seem to be more than three potential normative reasons for submitting to
authority than legality, tradition, and charisma. But Webers basic point is that there is an
empirical connection between certain kinds of legitimating formulas and the organizational
structure of historically important relationships of domination (Matheson 1987). Thus legalrational orders are bureaucracies (where action takes place according to clearly specified rules
and the importance of personal ties of loyalty is relatively small); traditional orders are nonbureaucratic patrimonial hierarchies (where action takes place within the constraints of vaguely
specified normative limits understood as sacred and personal ties of loyalty are relatively
important); and charismatic orders are personal followings (not bound by established
normative limits and entirely dependent on personal ties to a person who is thought to have
extraordinary qualities).
Whatever the status and usefulness of Webers tripartite division of legitimacy claims may be,
however, the key point remains that an explanation of a social order for Weber must point to
the way in which certain public justificatory claims (what I called evaluative and authority

14

norms above) become shared or public reasons for action. But how can this happen? The
obvious interpretation (and the one that Weber seems to prefer in speaking of beliefs in
legitimacy see Beetham 1992, p. 23; Weber 1978 [1922], pp. 215-216) is that such public
justifications are effective to the extent that most of those subject to the social order take
ownership of them as part of their own reasons for acting or not acting in particular ways that
can override their non-shared private reasons. Public justifications thus become private
reasons, and norms become internalized. This is the narrow conception of legitimacy, which is
also evident in many modern accounts of legitimacy noted earlier.
Yet it is simply not empirically clear that most people in legitimate orders (bureaucracies,
patrimonial hierarchies, and personal followings) actually are motivated to obey because they
believe in the public justifications offered by those in power in any significant sense, i.e., that
they take the reasons offered in these discourses of justification as the main reasons that
motivate their action. This is most obvious in the case of slavery, where it is clear that the
legitimating discourses used by slaveholders could hardly be expected to convince the slaves
themselves (though they could have helped motivate the cooperation of slaveholders to
enforce the norm of slavery); but many quite stable societies do not depend for their stability
on the transformation of public reasons into private reasons, as we can tell from divergences
between the hidden and the public transcripts (see, for a detailed example in an agrarian
society, Scott 1985). Weber is well aware of this point:
It is by no means true that every case of submissiveness of persons in positions of power
is primarily (or even at all) oriented to this belief [viz., the belief that those in authority

15

have a right to command]. Loyalty may be hypocritically simulated by individuals or by

whole groups on purely opportunistic grounds, or carried out in practice for reasons of
material self-interest. Or people may submit from individual weakness and helplessness
because there is no acceptable alternative (Weber 1978 [1922], p. 214)
The important point is less whether individual action is motivated by the belief in legitimacy
(the internalization of authority norms) than that in any given case the particular claim to
legitimacy is to a significant degree and according to its type treated as valid(Weber 1978
[1922], p. 214). But, as Weber himself acknowledges, there are a wide variety of ways in which
a norm may be taken as valid for the purposes of public justification and public behavior,
ranging from pure acting as if one believed in the claim (Wedeen 1998; Kuran 1997; Havel
1992) to the full internalization of the reasons for action embedded in the public justification
(see Tilly 1991, for a list of possibilities). In other words, to say that the norm justifying a
relationship of domination is valid (and thus motivationally relevant) is to say very little about
the mechanisms that determine action in accordance with it, since belief in the norm is not the
only way in which the norm can be recognized as motivationally relevant.
Recognizing this problem, Beetham (1992, 2013) attempts to improve on Webers narrow
model of legitimacy by explicitly abandoning the idea of beliefs in legitimacy and instead
speaking primarily about the congruence between shared beliefs and public justifications. On
Beethams model, to ask whether a political system (for example) is legitimate is to ask not
about whether people take the public reasons for action offered by a discourse of justification
as their own private reasons for action, but (in the first instance) about observable features of

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the system that show congruence between shared beliefs and public justifications, such as
whether the publicly recognized rules authorizing action are followed (and hence whether
action is in accordance with valid authority norms), whether the justifications of the norms
regulating authority appeal to widely shared beliefs (and hence whether action is in accord with
valid evaluative norms), and whether those subject to authority publicly express their
recognition of the relevant authority norms (thus providing evidence of their validity).9
The key point in Beethams account is that legitimate relationships of domination tend to
generate the evidence for their own justification. In his view, the justifications for the norms
that govern a relationship of domination are not merely the manipulative rhetoric of the
powerful indeed, Beetham thinks explicit manipulation results not in persuasion but in
cynicism, as happened in the communist states of Eastern Europe in the 1980s but rather
claims that are justified by the social facts generated by the system itself. For example, if the
powerful claim that their position is justified because of their superior education or political
intelligence, then to the extent that the relationship is legitimate, the system in which it is
embedded will tend to differentially provide the powerful with greater education and
opportunities to develop political intelligence than the subordinate; if the powerful claim that it
is only by following the rules that the subordinate will get ahead, the operation of the
relationship will make that claim credible. Legitimacy is institutionalized persuasion because
legitimate systems manufacture credible claims.

In the 1992 edition of his work, Beetham used the term acts of consent. But in the 2013 edition, Beetham
suggests that the word consent is too close to the subjectivity of the narrow conception of legitimacy, and
prefers to speak of acts of recognition (see p. 267).

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Beetham does not claim that every social system is experienced as legitimate, or that every
social system has equal need of legitimacy; the need for legitimacy is always related to the
purposes of those in authority, and is greater in political orders that explicitly incorporate the
mass of the population in politics (Beetham 2013, pp. 30-3, 256). But those social systems
which are not experienced as legitimate are precisely those where the subordinate can perceive
an obvious gap between the qualities or actions the powerful say justify their position and the
qualities they actually have, or between the possibilities for pursuing their interests given
within the system and possibilities obviously available elsewhere. Explanations that appeal to
legitimacy, for Beetham, are thus fundamentally about the mechanisms that affect the
credibility of justificatory claims within large-scale social systems, including the evidence that
public rules have been followed, that justificatory claims are plausible in terms of the
subordinates lived experiences, and that others publicly recognize to the norms governing the
system. Yet the mechanisms that generate credible justificatory claims and thus promote the
recognition of norms as valid are quite disparate, with different effects on the stability of
particular relationships of domination and the norms that justify them.

Mechanisms of Norm-recognition
Four (non-exhaustive) possibilities are worth noting:
1. Recognition of the validity of an authority norm, and hence submission to a relationship
of domination, may occur for epistemic reasons. The dominated may submit to the
dominant because they do not know whether some superior alternative relationship
exists, or have insufficient evidence that apparently superior alternatives are in fact

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better than the existing relationship, or have insufficient evidence that the process of
changing the existing relationship will not in fact worsen their situation, regardless of
the content of the justificatory discourse used by the dominant. Social systems are
complex, and conservatism is often quite rational; it is not obviously wrong for the
dominated to think things could be worse than they are, even if they are aware of
(apparent, yet untested) superior alternatives.

Such epistemic considerations may also underwrite trust in particular institutions or

aspects of a social order: if the social order has proven beneficial (relative to alternatives
judged to be feasible) in the past, it makes sense to put up with it even if one is aware
of untested alternatives that might be even better than the current arrangements, but
whose actual performance is in doubt. This is what is commonly meant by performance
legitimacy (the legitimacy gained by a political system because it is associated with
positive economic or social outcomes), even though such performance legitimacy is only
incidentally connected to the private acceptance of the public reasons justifying the
political order. At any rate, to trust that a political order will continue to be acceptable
does not require that the dominant deploy justificatory discourses, or that the
dominated accept any such justifications and commit themselves to the social order on
that basis; all it requires is some kind of cost-benefit analysis on their part relative to
feasible alternatives, where feasible alternatives are specified in terms of the
opportunities for exit or collective action that seem available at any particular time,
given the evidence that the current order produces certain benefits.

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It may be the case that the belief that there are no alternatives to existing arrangements
emerges only because the dominant monopolize the public sphere in such a way as to
obfuscate relevant information about such alternatives. But even then no beliefs in the
legitimacy of the relationship need play any large role in sustaining it. The belief
(whether true or false) that no acceptable alternatives to this relationship are currently
available or feasible is not equivalent to the acceptance of the justificatory discourses
for the relationship. At best we might say that the relationship is epistemically justified
to the dominated, i.e., that given available information they justifiably believe that there
are no feasible alternative relationships that would improve their condition. But in this
case no obligations are recognized, and submission does not occur because of the
acceptance of any justificatory discourses.

In these cases, beliefs in the narrow legitimacy of the relationship may often be
understood as adaptive responses to the perceived lack of alternatives, or what social
psychologists call system justification (Jost, Banaji, and Nosek 2004), and thus may
play little or no causal role in actually sustaining the relationship (except perhaps in
leading the dominated to stop looking for alternatives). For example, a number of
experiments suggest that the more a restriction is perceived to be absolute or
inescapable, the more it is likely to be adaptively rationalized (Laurin, Kay, and
Fitzsimons 2012); to the extent that people believe a relationship is legitimate because
they see no feasible alternative, the attendant recognition of the justificatory norm

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plays no causal role in sustaining the relationship. Such rationalizing or adaptive beliefs
in the legitimacy of a relationship, in other words, may be effects, not causes, of the
epistemic difficulty people enmeshed in complex systems of domination have in
evaluating alternatives.

These epistemic difficulties also have much to do with the very social nature of the
knowledge involved. The evidence that some alternative is not feasible is partly
constituted by the fact that other people say or express that they believe it is not
feasible, because any alternative to the status quo would normally require coordinating
away from it with a substantial number of others. So the evidence for the feasibility of
some alternative to the existing political or social order has the character of what Kuran
has called social proof (Kuran 1991): what is feasible depends partly on what others
think is feasible. Consider, for example, the use of rigged elections in authoritarian
regimes: the point of these elections is often to signal invincibility (Magaloni 2006;
Magaloni and Kricheli 2010; Gandhi and Okar 2009), i.e., to produce a sense that
alternatives are not feasible, not necessarily to convince a population of the rulers or
the partys right to rule. These elections do not legitimate a regime in the narrow sense
of the term, but they do provide social proof that alternatives are unlikely.

2. Recognition of the validity of an authority norm, and hence submission to a relationship

of domination, may occur because of coordination dilemmas. Even though better
alternatives are known to exist, the dominated are unable to mobilize collective action

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in favor of any particular alternative, and individual efforts to exit the relationship are
ineffective. And though the subordinate may prefer an alternative relationship, they do
not all prefer the same alternative, and have no obvious way of agreeing on an
alternative and coordinating their actions to achieve it. As in the previous case, the
persistence of a relationship may thus give rise to system justification beliefs (or just
world bias: see Furnham 2003). But these beliefs need not play any actual role in
sustaining the relationship: they may be responses to, not causes of, the inability of the
subordinate to exit or alter meaningfully alter the relationship.

Many unpopular practices (e.g., paying bribes for public services in many parts of the
world) persist not because people find them legitimate in a narrow sense (justified by
a norm they internalize), but because they cannot find any way to coordinate away from
them without losing access to important goods (Bicchieri and Fukui 1999; Bicchieri and
Duffy 1997). But even practices that appear to depend on thoroughly internalized norms
are sometimes explained better by the lack of particular coordination mechanisms. For
example, consider the practice of footbinding in China before the 20 th century (Mackie
1996). This oppressive practice was legitimated by a normative understanding of purity
and female beauty that was widely accepted by women because it generated the
evidence for its own justification: women who did not bind their feet would lose out on
the marriage market, marking them as low status, and only low status women would fail
to bind their feet (because, e.g., they could not afford to do so given that they needed
to work in the fields). It made sense, in these circumstances, for higher-status women to

22

bind their feet (or for their mothers to do so), and indeed the fact that they did so
meant that they engaged in acts recognizing the validity of the norm.

Yet the justificatory claims for the practice were credible only because the affected
women faced coordination dilemmas. While women as a group might have preferred
not to bind their feet, each individual woman was in fact better off by pursuing
footbinding, at least within a context where marriage was seen as otherwise highly
valuable; and the difficulties of exit then produced adaptive rationalizations for the
norm. By the same token, when commitment mechanisms enabled whole villages to opt
out of the footbinding practice at the same time, providing an exit option to women,
apparently legitimating norms tended to lose their hold. The practice was thus disrupted
not because people were persuaded that it was not in accord with widely shared beliefs
(i.e., because it lost legitimacy), but because new exit or collective action opportunities
undermined the credibility of justifications for the practice and thus made them
dispensable in light of the values they pragmatically pursued in everyday life. The
possibilities for coordination within the marriage market provide a better causal account
of changes in the practice of footbinding than the justificatory discourses that at one
point rationalized it; under the right circumstances, the practice was far less robust than
a simple account in terms of its legitimacy might have led one to think.

The resilience of many political orders to broad-based revolt will also often depend on
such collective action problems (Olson 1971): even if many people believe in the

23

illegitimacy of a particular social order (i.e., do not accept the justifications offered for it
by the dominant), collective action is costly and subject to free-riding. While these
collective action problems are of course not insurmountable, the key point to note is
that belief in the rightness of a social order is far less important to the explanation of the
stability of the social order in this case than the conditions that either intensify or
resolve the collective action problem faced by those who prefer change, and these
conditions have less to do with the beliefs themselves than with the way in which signals
of other peoples commitment to the social order are weighed and found credible
(Bhavnani and Ross 2003; Lohmann 1994).

3. Submission to a relationship of domination may occur because of a desire to affiliate

with people of a particular group or to live up to values associated with a particular
identity. Consider what is involved in making a claim like ensuring female and minority
representation in the higher reaches of the party may enhance the [Chinese] regimes
legitimacy (Shih, Adolph, and Liu 2012, 169). To the extent that the claim identifies a
causal relation linking the representation of minorities to the stability of the Chinese
regime, this relation can be mediated either by beliefs in the moral desirability of fair
minority representation or by the desire of minority groups to affiliate with the regime
(to tie their status to the status of the regime and identify with it, etc.) if the regime
made efforts to recognize and raise their status (by granting honours to people with
whom they can be expected to identify, for example). These are generally different
mechanisms: an identity-based explanation of stability is essentially grounded on the

24

(self-)interest of individuals in recognition and status, whereas a narrow legitimacybased explanation is based on the acceptance of public reasons (e.g., the fairness of
representation). But they are not easily distinguishable in many circumstances, since
claims for greater status are typically couched in the language of fair representation.
More generally, cooperation with the dominant on the basis of peer opinion (doing
what ones identity group expects) is different from cooperation on the basis of
internalization of justificatory norms, as some of the more careful work on legitimacy
acknowledges (cf. Tyler 2006b, chapter 5).

4. Finally, we should note that even when people do sincerely have an attachment to some
particular social order, or even believe sincerely that a relationship is justified (and this
belief is not produced by the fact that the relationship is not easily exited or altered),
this fact may imply little about their level of commitment to the maintenance of the
relationship in particular circumstances. People may be sincerely committed to the
maintenance of a relationship abstractly in what psychologists call far mode
(Trope and Liberman 2010) and yet show no particular commitment to it when
circumstances demand it in the here and now, and risks increase. Evidence from
psychological experiments suggests that peoples commitments to principled action (of
the kind required to preserve a legitimate relationship) are highly situational and
can change with even relatively minor changes in circumstances (Doris 2002).

25

The point is not that these far commitments are insincere, or that peoples expressed
ideas about the justice of particular social orders do not matter; only that they may not
affect action in uncommon circumstances (which are precisely the sorts of
circumstances when social change happens). So the fact that people express, for
example, views that suggest they regard democracy as a legitimate social order, does
not say much about their actual commitment to its defense in risky situations, as public
opinion researchers have found (Inglehart 2003). To say that people believe what they
say (that is, are sincere in their judgments) is insufficient, in a sense, to attribute to
them belief in what they say. A belief has to be conceivable as a certain degree of
consistency in action relative to some proposition across multiple situations
(Schwitzgebel 2010, 2001); and under sufficiently large constraints on exiting a
relationship or voicing dissatisfaction with it, such pragmatic cross-situational
consistency tends to break down.
None of this is to say that beliefs in the justificatory norms of political and social order never
play any role in sustaining them. But we cannot assume that they are always an important,
much less essential, factor for the stability or performance of a relationship of domination; and
speaking loosely of how certain practices legitimate a political order by appealing to certain
valid justificatory norms can be highly misleading. For example, though political scientists often
claim that single party or otherwise unfair elections legitimate governments (Brooker 2014,
pp. 110-114), there is very little evidence that such a legitimating function is the main or even
the most important purpose of holding such elections, or that the coerced support they
demand generates much in the way of genuine commitments to a regime (cf. Karklins 1986, on

26

Soviet elections; Kershaw 1987, on Nazi plebiscites). Elections can intimidate, demoralize,
confuse, and disrupt oppositions ability to engage in collective action, as well as mobilize
supporters and enhance elite commitments to a regime before they generate any sort of
normative commitments on the part of the majority of citizens; and they need not be credible
as demonstrations of popular support or legitimacy to function as credible signals of
invincibility, permanence, and the like.

Legitimation and Social Explanation

If the recognition of norms justifying relationships of domination (and hence support for and
acquiescence to political and social orders) can be produced by different mechanisms, with
different implications for the stability of particular relationships, we may thus wish to dispense
with talk about legitimation and focus on these mechanisms directly. Yet one might still argue
that such a focus would miss the forest for the trees, since it would neglect the central role of
justificatory talk in actual politics. What accounts for the prevalence of justificatory discourses
in politics (all the legitimating activities of political actors), if not the fact that legitimacy is
highly relevant to the production and maintenance of relationships of domination?
It is true that political discourse is full of efforts to make others treat certain normative claims
as valid, and that a great deal of effort is expended in providing justifications for these claims,
since norms that are held to be valid become motivationally relevant for those subject to them.
But the legitimating activities of political actors are typically geared to produce public
commitments to, not the sincere internalization of, authority and evaluative norms. And, as we

27

saw above, the credibility of public (i.e., visible) commitments to such norms can be achieved in
many different ways.
Very generally, we might say that in treating a legitimacy claim as valid, one wishes to signal a
commitment to a particular social order or relationship and hence to behave according to the
discursive consequences of the claim, regardless of ones private judgment about the substance
of the claim. To use a Weberian example, in a legal-rational order ones actions must be
interpretable as legal (regardless of ones intentions), i.e., credibly seen as falling within (what is
publicly recognized as) the law, whereas in a traditional order ones actions must be colorable
as traditional, i.e., credibly seen as in accordance with tradition. But when many people treat a
legitimacy claim as valid certain kinds of justifications for action become expected within
particular groups, and not giving the expected justification (or behaving according to the
expected discourse of justification) singles one out for sanctions and exclusion (among other
possibilities).
A relationship of domination thus acquires stability not because people internalize the
justifications offered for the relationship (the narrow sense of legitimacy); rather, it acquires
stability because people credibly signal their commitment to it by using the shared discourse of
justification; and the ensemble of such signals influences the commitment of all others in the
relationship. In particular, people may signal commitment to a political order because other
people are giving credible signals of commitment; and if enough other people are signalling
their commitment, it may make little sense for any individual to do otherwise. Such generalized
credible signals of commitment may in turn induce adjustments in ones inner judgments

28

about the justifying norms of the relationships (especially given tendencies toward
confirmation bias and conformism), but these effects may not be particularly important to the
stability of the relationship. By the same token, signalling some commitment to a norm is
compatible with private avoidance or shirking, dislike of the norm, and so on.
A discourse of justification is thus a kind of focal point for coordinating expectations of stability:
it generates widespread expectations about publicly acceptable reasons and explanations for
action within a relationship, and it sets the standard of commitment that these explanations
and actions must achieve. Alternative justifications and explanations for action cease to be
credible as signals of commitment simply because they are not expressed through the public
discourse of justification. But the stability of relationships of domination is not causally
explained by pointing to the acceptance of these public reasons. The discourse of justification is
merely the form of the commitment, not the cause of the commitment.
What matters for explanations of social change are the conditions under which alternative
normative claims can emerge as focal points for new signaling systems, or under which the
signaling equilibrium is disrupted. Here traditional explanations of social change based on
legitimacy have somewhat more to say: there are many common conditions under which, for
example, the failure of authorities to demonstrate a credible commitment to norms of justice
or fairness to which they or the population are publicly committed produces anger and in turn
triggers activities that reduce the costs of coordinating signals of commitment to a different
social order (Goldstone 2001). But anything that can trigger substantial changes in the costs of
exiting the relationship (as understood from within the relationship) or coordinating

29

commitments to a different relationship will have substantial impacts on expectations of its

stability. From this point of view, legitimacy in the narrow sense of the term is merely the
residual of exit and voice what Hirschman (2004) called loyalty: it is what is left of
commitment to a relationship that is not explained by the possibility of exit or collective action.
But there is little reason to believe that, when the costs of exit are large or the possibility of
collective action remote, this residual is often large or important.

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