Politics of Legitimacy and Legitimation in Global Governance

Description

Political legitimacy and legitimation are among the crucial issues of political science in general as well as in the subfield of Comparative Politics. But both issues are essentially debated. Their multi-dimensional character is often raised, but so far not extensively elaborated upon in the literature. Legitimacy and Legitimation relate to core questions in political science – the relation between rulers and ruled, the properties of a political system, its democratic quality, the rule of law, and its policy output, to name but a few. Moreover, the concept of legitimacy refers to normative and theoretical as well as empirical dimensions of research. Finally, both concepts are linked in a way that is not always conceptually and empirically clear. This present book “Politics of Legitimacy and Legitimation in Global Governance” deals with conceptual and methodological questions as well as on recent developments in the field of comparative research on political legitimacy. We describe the methods used to empirically study legitimacy and legitimation, preview the articles of the special issue, and chart next steps for this research agenda.