Perspectives on a Contested Topic: Individual Criteria, Interactive Conditionality and Political Outcomes of Legitimacy

A legitimate political system does not need to rely on force or co-optation to ensure compliance and is better able to achieve a sense of belonging and trust. Achieving such legitimacy perceptions among the ruled is no easy task and its scientific debate remains separated into normative and empirical-analytical perspectives. Using the latter approach, this synopsis emphasizes that the roots of beliefs in obedience influence the mechanism of legitimation in shaping political outcomes. This synopsis connects three separate articles that form this dissertation and extends the initial analysis in a comprehensive path-model. This dissertation argues and shows that beliefs in obedience influence the demand side of a congruence-based understanding of legitimation in such way that citizens’ personal experiences, their surrounding culture and historical contexts shape the underlying (oftentimes implicit) evaluation criteria for evaluating governmental claims to legitimacy. The differences in evaluation criteria then moderate which claims fall on fertile ground and which claims are rejected – leading to congruence or incongruence. Finally, when claims and demands are congruent, two things may follow: First, citizens express satisfaction and consent to the current regime – exemplified by evaluating their government as democratic even if it is not. Second, regimes can use this legitimate status to change the institutional structure based on their visions. This is especially worrisome, as it allows also elected rulers to gain more leeway and pave the way for further autocratization.