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Introduction: Characteristics of Legitimacy

Legitimacy is an awkward subject, because it does not exist by itself, it exists in a series of potentially shifting cosmologies, customs, relationships, contexts and struggles. Legitimacy exists within complex systems, with all of the problems involved in analysing those systems.

Legitimacy is not really a noun or a thing in itself (that usage leads to significant problems), it is a descriptor – some thing, practice, process, institution, custom, series of events or group of people (henceforth abridged as ‘thing/process’), has gained some kind of ‘legitimacy’ somehow or other, and that legitimacy probably varies throughout society, throughout different groups, and probably has to be maintained in someway.

Early studies on legitimacy tended to focus on powerful organisations such as the State. In this case legitimacy essentially meant the ‘right’, or ‘rightness’ of dominant people to be accepted in their dominance. This implies that legitimacy is a moral or political question, inherently associated with ethics – in the west of rights, or of God’s will. The democratic move of the early 17th Century was based on the idea that at least some of the ‘ordinary people’ being governed should have to consent to the governing for it to be legitimate. David Hume, went as far as to imply the fact that the governing existed meant there was some consent, even if there was only the consent of fear and imagination, otherwise no one would follow the instructions, and the thing/process would fall apart. The consent of imagining implies some precarity in the legitimacy of any institution, thing/process etc.

A thing/process’s legitimacy may not always have an on/off switch, and may only rarely be agreed to by 100% of the affected population; as such it always carries the possibility of contestation. We may need to recognise that what we call a thing/processes’ legitimacy can always be partial. Perhaps this can be indicated by using some more complicated term like ‘degrees of legitimacy’, or ‘ratios of legitimacy,’ even if these degrees may be impossible to measure.

More recently, a thing/processes’ legitimacy has been perceived as form of ethical/political struggle in which a process, thing, or series of events, is made ‘legitimate’ in the sense it has (enough) significant support, or lack of hostility, which allows it to function. The support, lack of significant hostility, or acceptance, seems important.

It is possible that a group’s legitimacy to rule, may not be agreed to, by the vast majority of the population, but the group claiming legitimacy holds effective violence or is ‘supported by’ social inertia – people can’t be bothered to get rid of them, or the authority is perceived as irrelevant in most cases. The authority of the dominant group does not necessarily rely on a positive belief about that group, or even that something is so, for most people. The claim of legitimacy may be a claim that tries to make a belief in legitimacy, but is ignored. Legitimacy may only matter when it is challenged.

People can adapt to events (reluctantly), rather than overtly resist them, so these events may again have little ‘legitimacy’ (in the sense the term is usually used) for many people. The thing/process is an expected order rather than an accepted or supported order. Legitimacy might then appear to be habits, or simply ‘imagined order,’ even if the promised order is yet to arrive, as with communist or capitalist utopias.

That could mean the process has tacit acceptance to a degree. Analysists might try to remove tacit acceptance from questions of legitimacy, but that is reducing the complexities, and factors around the struggle. I’m suggesting that we recognise those variations, and avoid the idea that the legitimacy of something is a positive belief about that something, but more a lack of effective challenge at the moment, or a relative confidence the thing/process cannot be challenged usefully. Defining legitimacy as a belief that something is legitimate is not very helpful, (I’m not even sure legitimacy is a concept widely used outside of sociology and politics) but it might be possible to say more if we think of it as depending on many factors some of which may be beliefs and some of which are not. Another way of expressing this might be to state an organisation has a high degree of legitimacy if there is no obvious or effective deligitimation.

Finally, institutions and processes etc. can become sites of power struggles and conflict themselves; they do not have to be uniform, or simply an abject tool of one class alone. Culture, information and ‘legitimacy’ does not have to be uniform within organisation, and this lack of uniformity can imply gaps of comprehension within that organisation, the generation of fantasies to explain the gaps and recognises some of the dynamics of change, not only because of internal conflict, but because of the possibility that external actors can insert themselves into the struggle.

While it may be useful to separate out legitimation and delegitimation practices into ‘discursive’ (spoken and written), institutional, and behavioural as do Bäckstrand & Söderbaum 2018, the reality is that these cannot be separated. Discourse practices are behavioural, and institutional; institutional practices are discusive and behavioural and so on. Behaviour is also a huge term, including regular customs and habits, violence, emulation, acting relationships etc….

Legitimacy, Ethics, Delegitimation

Legitimating of a thing/process, like ethics, involves a struggle to appear persuasive, right, virtuous, inevitable, effective and so on. Like ethics it affects, and is affected by: cosmology (whether it fits with the supposed working of the universe); is a familiar or established custom (that fits in with the cosmos or not); copying valued others; whether it allows whatever is considered ‘normal politics,’ and the supposedly ‘real’ relationships between groups to function – the strongest dictatorship is not without internal politics. Likewise the context of the debate is important to give it meaning, or limit the range of possibilities. Legitimacy can also be enforced by power relations, by law as a symbol of power relations, and sometimes by violence or threat; To establish legitimacy, powerful people may try to render other plausible actions illegitimate, they will certainly exclude some people from real power. Although, if an organisation’s legitimacy appears to depend only on violence, it may also, in some circumstances, appear illegitimate. Like many other processes, what is used to attain it, can also undermine it. However, domination can appear legitimate, if it survives long enough. Yet again, if a group is growing in power, the systems that ignored it or held it down, may look increasingly illegitimate to that group and others, or the groups can be deceived and pull things down in a way that further disempowers them. Like ethics a change in context can change a thing/process’s legitimacy for some people.

To repeat, the existence of ethical positions in a society, does not imply uniform norms throughout society and so we cannot appeal to these overarching norms as explanations for legitimating activity or degrees of legitimacy. Likewise ethics do not assume everyone has the same beliefs. That some thing/process is present and accepted, may create any widespread norms, rather than be justified by them.

The recognition of, or achievement of, the appearance of degrees of legitimacy by a thing/process, implies the possibility that it’s legitimacy may be challenged. Further, some of those degrees of legitimacy are risked every time it is pushed, stretched or fails, or it could be open to destabilisation, from either (random?) ‘internal’ or ‘external’ events. Motion is not an addition to a ‘normal’ stasis or equilibrium. Processes are always in flux, and always have the potential to be self-undermining.

Legitimating activity may depend on ‘something’ else being declared illegitimate or unfavourable. There may be no binary, or dialectic here, with processes simply being either legitimate or illegitimate; they may have both characteristics in different degrees for different parts of society – making appeals to different groups. We may need to think of (de)legitimisation processes as intertwined and shape each other (Bäckstrand & Söderbaum 2018, Uhlin 2019), while recognising what it is that appears legitimating for one group may appear delegitimating for another.

The possibility of ‘de-legitimation’ comes with legitimation itself, just as the possibility of ‘mis’, or ‘dis’ information comes with ‘information.’ Legitimising and delegitimising agency may be anywhere in society, although clearly the greater the power, wealth and control of information, the more likely the agency will have effect up to a point – that is that the powerful people making the legitmation case, are themselves considered legitimate, or they do not understand that the arguments they think are persuasive actually delegitimate themselves in the eyes of their audience. Legitimation and de-legitimation struggles seem likely to shape each other, as legitimacy of a thing/process implies something else is not as legitimate.

Social Category theory

Social Category theory suggest that the social groups associated with thing/processes can be categorised in ways which help legitimation and delegitimation practices. These groups are classified in relationship to other groups people identify with or against. This schema is based on Bar-Tal 2004, with a few other practices added. The point is that legitimacy and illegitimacy can be generated by separating people into opposed categories.

Once this process of separation and opposition, gets going, it maintains and intensifies a context of lack of discussion and mutual attack, which magnifies the ill feelings the groups have towards each other – this can then be magnified by media – which gives people a shared experience of attack and name calling.

Institutions

Institutions are social groupings, composed of social groups, with specific kinds of tasks. Institutions often, but not always, help group people together while excluding others. They support particular behavioural practices – not necessarily for everyone equally. As such they provide some ground for the behaviour which needs justification and thus produce ethical ‘systems’ (systems here does not imply the ethics has to be systematic. Institutions also provide targets, if people can be persuaded that their ethical/behavioural system is not ethical, or they do non-acceptable things, and they are too weak to respond, or they over-respond, then they have degrees of illegitimacy. I’ve already suggested institutions do not have to be places of harmony, they can be places of struggle in themselves – this can make make them legitimate as people can see their interests represented, but it can also make them appear vulnerable, or incoherent. To the extent that institutions issue guidelines, they can also dismantle guidelines. Institutions which focus too much on internal conflicts or the acquisition of internal benefits can be very bad at adapting to changes in the ‘external world’ and thus delegitimate themselves through failure to win people over, or through practices which have become destructive.

Example: Delegitimising US Government

Legitimacy of a process (etc.) can be precarious and subject to quite rapid change. It was probably inconceivable, 2 years ago, that US election results would be widely disbelieved in the US, with the concurrent assumption that not only was the election illegitimate, but the Presidential results, and hence the Presidency, are also illegitimate. This suggests relatively high degree of legitimacy can be broken by political struggle. How broken it is, we cannot know in advance, and still do not know, but it is not looking good.

Increasing the degree of legitimacy of Trump’s claims requires the delegitimating of Biden, his party and the electoral system, while delegitimating Trump only require delegitimating him and his party, so the shock of delegitimation is even greater. But the struggle involves a lot of delegitimating of both ‘sides’, which adds to the legitimacy problems of the system, and hence reinforces the Republican position.

Supporters of the ex-president, assert both a) the moral superiority of Donald Trump over the ethical integrity, or legitimacy, of the whole electoral system, and b) their victimhood to the established system which therefore has to be challenged. To those on ‘any other side’ such an assertion seems ridiculous, but it clearly appears likely to be accepted by a significantly large number of voters in the US and elsewhere, and almost certainly cannot be ignored with impunity.

In my experience, social categories worked pretty much as we me might expect. Democrats and Republicans rendered each other subhuman with attributes like: stupid, can’t think for themselves, easily deceived by their media, hypocritical, oppressive, selfish, sneaky, anti-American, all the same, riotous, oppressive, destructive and criminal. On top of that Republicans classed Democrats as communists and fascists, and Democrats classified Republicans as fascist. Discrediting all the people involved discredited anything the others did, and the system involved – the electoral system was seen by many Republicans as part of the Democrat machine, with the characteristics they associated with that machine. In this view, nothing was independent. You were either for them or against them.

Mutual participation does not mean both sides are equally to blame for the situation, but it does mean they are participating in the system of collapse, and helping to intensify the separation.

The events also shows that evidence, and argument do not have to be coherent, or detailed, (especially when the category moves are in play) for them to have an effect in some circumstances. The overwhelming, and growing, affective truth of the feeling that ordinary people in the US have little input into their government (are victims of the system), threatens the legitimacy of governance processes – the fact that Trump is called out as illegitimate, may only add to the effectiveness of his claims, as he is being pronounced illegitimate by a system which is losing legitimacy – and is felt to be oppressive which, in turn, delegitimises that governance in terms of US cosmology.

The context of the power struggles over government in the US has also changed over the last 20 years.

• Corporations have become more dominant (because of wealth appropriation, and legal rulings magnifying corporate rights and political purchase) and ‘ordinary people’ have become more excluded through that extension of dominance producing a kind of ‘distant dominance‘.
• Governments have repeatedly failed to solve the growing problems of life, or include people in the governing process.
• One party has consistently argued that governments cannot do anything useful and everything should be left to business and The Market, reinforcing the above two points, increasing corporate power and decreasing governmental competence or ability to reach out to the people.
• The information ecology has changed radically, meaning it is harder to create community unanimity. It is also easier to manipulate people, create antagonistic information groups fueled by anger against ‘the others’, to keep revitalising positions with little real validity, and to add unspecified power to allegations the internet was involved in the fraud.
• The economy, life and ecology have also become more precarious, partly because of corporate dominance and the pursuit of destructive methods of producing order and power.

All these changes in context, threaten established habits, customs ways of life, and the sustainability of the dominance which has created these conditions. This change possibly renders even extremely mild challenges to corporate power, like Joe Biden and the Democrats, something that has to be de-legitimized to keep that power going. So powerful people throw their weight behind it, sure of their ability to ride the waves, something which they probably would not have been risked even 20 years ago…

Not only is the power struggle different, but the implied rules around what is permissible in power struggles have changed, and the context of struggles have changed. Results granting Presidency to one party have become delegitimised, and perhaps the whole system will come to share that fate.

This is a risky game for the Republicans, as their own legitimacy is challenged in the process but, from my position, it seems plausible to assert that when they win, which they almost certainly will through stacked elections, vote prevention and threats to those who proclaim results they don’t want, they will attempt to enforce legitimacy through violence, threat and law (engaging in shadow politics), while proclaiming this violence is supporting liberty for their followers. This will probably render the system even more doomed, as it will suppress responses to real challenges, or even the recognition of real challenges.

Legitimation/Delegitimation Struggles and the Fossil fuel Industry

A similar dynamics could apply to fossil fuels. Their legitimacy is not only dependent upon a perceived need for cheap customary energy and exports, but upon the dominance of parts of the corporate sector, and a degree of ‘invisible violence’ – ignoring court decisions when appropriate, changing the law to allow continuance, changing regulation to make alternatives difficult, poisoning locals, disrupting or destroying ecologies, increased penalties for protest etc.. This legitimacy could theoretically slide as quickly as that of US elections, although established dominance is probably largely on the side of fossil fuels and profit at any cost. However, the gorwing explicitness of this siding may undermine the appearance of legitimacy, and other corporations may wonder about their survival and change sides on this issue, as with the Business Council of Australia recently going for emissions targets that 2 years ago it said would destroy the economy. Whether the announced change of the Murdoch Empire’s position in Australia is real, a smokescreen, or an attempt to minimise action, will be seen with time, as was their last supposed change.

One of my colleagues, pointed out that delegitimation is part of the process of change, not just when climate change, pollution or health issues, are used to delegitimate coal and gas in Australia, but in India. sometimes people will come in to villages to attempt, actively, to de-legitimise old modes of life, as when Indian villagers are told not to use cowpats as fuel. Unintended consequences may be generated (what happens with the cowpats, now?), which then become part of the process, and disrupt it.

To reiterate, legitimate/illegitimate does not have to be an exclusive binary. Coal can appear to be part of the expected order and to disrupt that order, and it is this ‘paradox’ that allows questioning to be generated. Going off coal will likely disrupt the expected order and legitimate order for some people. Saying, to those people, we have to change our lives and get off coal, merely proves this disruption to those people.

Legitimacy can also cause people to ignore vital factors. For example, renewable energy is absolutely necessary for transition away from a destructive system, but where do we get the energy to produce all the renewables we need on top of the energy we need to continue life as it is?

We can only survive, should that be an ethical goal, if we reduce energy usage considerably and quickly.

The Next part of this series discusses legitimation issues for Fossil Fuels in Narrabri, a country town in NSW.

Tags: ethics, politics

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