Legitimacy is both a normative and an empirical concept in political science. Normatively, to ask whether a political system is legitimate or not is to ask whether the state, or government, is entitled to be obeyed. As such the idea of legitimacy is connected with the legal concepts of de jure and de facto power. Whatever the accepted grounds of political obligation may be, legitimacy refers to these. Its more interesting application, however, may be in the empirical usage, especially in political sociology. Here the concentration is principally on how any given political system comes to be seen as ‘legitimate’ by a majority of its citizens.
Why do most citizens of the USA and the People’s Republic of China see their government as entitled to require their obedience when, presumably, people are much the same in both countries but the policies and structures of the state are very different? This is the question addressed by those who study legitimacy as an empirical fact rather than a philosophical problem. As well as being a major question in such research, the bases of legitimacy, a categorization of systemical grounds for obedience that actually work, can provide most useful rules for grouping different sorts of political systems. Many of the classifications of political systems found in the modern study of comparative government rely on typologies based on the various grounds of political legitimacy. (These, incidentally, nearly all derive in one way or another from the pioneering work of Max Weber.) Thus democracies tend to argue for their legitimacy in terms of giving voters what they immediately want, while other political systems may offer general principles to support their right to command. Socialist states may focus on the ultimate benefit to workers, right-wing juntas on some sense of traditional national identity. In recent social science considerable attention has been paid to a so called ‘crisis of legitimacy’, by which is meant the increasing difficulty Western states have in justifying themselves, because their only appeal is to utilitarian socio-economic rewards which they are incapable of sustaining.
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