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Illegitimacy is widely identified as a cause of revolution and other forms of transformative political change, yet when and how it affects these processes is ambiguous. We examine when and how illegitimacy affects the stability of political regimes through a historical analysis of South Africa's National Party (NP) and its apartheid regime, which lasted from 1948 to 1994. Many scholars of South Africa identify the regime's illegitimacy as a catalyst for the end of apartheid. Yet, consistent with assertions that illegitimacy does not result in political instability, the NP maintained power for decades despite a domestic crisis of legitimacy and a global movement that decried the apartheid regime's illegitimacy. Interrogating this contradiction, we detail how the regime's illegitimacy contributed to the negotiated revolution in South Africa when it resulted in unacceptable costs for the allies that the government depended on for survival, motivating those allies to withdraw support. Building on our findings, we detail how turning attention to the ways that illegitimacy affects relationships with allies – rather than particular outcomes, such as revolution or state failure – allows us to account for variation in both when and how illegitimacy matters.

This chapter proposes a sociological reconstruction of the emergence of citizenship as a source of legitimacy for political institutions, and it focuses on examining the historical processes that first gave rise to this concept. It explains how citizenship has its origins in the transformation of feudal law, a process that culminated in patterns of military organization that characterized the rise of the early modern state in Europe. On this basis, it describes how the growth of constitutional democracy was integrally marked by the militarization of society and explains that military pressures have remained palpable in constitutional constructions of citizenship. In particular, it argues that, through the early growth of democracy, national citizenship practices were closely linked to global conflicts, and they tended to replicate such conflicts in national contexts. It concludes by showing how more recent processes of constitutional norm formation, based largely in international human rights law, have acted to soften the military dimensions of citizenship.

This paper intends to explore the localist perspectives concerning Hong Kong’s political development. The persistent growth of localists in the polity of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) has not only challenged the current political order but also aroused Beijing’s national security considerations. The oath-taking controversies of 2016 demonstrated the strife that now exists between Beijing and the localists in Hong Kong. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the localists’ perceptions of the political decay, legitimacy crisis and reverse democratization in HKSAR to illuminate further their perceptions of Hong Kong’s political development.

This paper uses the theoretical discussion of the relations between political decay, legitimacy, the legitimacy crisis and reverse democratization as the key analytical framework to understand the localists’ perspective concerning Hong Kong’s political development. Based on an analysis of the localists’ discourse, the implication for the HKSAR regime’s legitimacy and for reverse democratization will be discussed.

The emergence of the new localists leads to the belief that Hong Kong’s political development is experiencing the reverse of democratization as the government cannot fully absorb the demands made by the general public. The reverse democratization is directly impacting the regime’s legitimacy, but in the HKSAR’s case, the new localists see the root of the problem as stemming from Beijing, that is that the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy problem is due to its underdevelopment in the legal, political and cultural spheres. This underdevelopment has weakened the legitimacy of the HKSAR’s administration, especially with regard to political reform, the legal interpretation of the Basic Law, and the influx of immigrants and tourists from the Mainland into the Hong Kong’s society. The China factor, from the Localists’ viewpoint, is at the root of the political decay and the legitimacy crisis in Hong Kong. More significantly, the localists regard the involvement of Beijing in Hong Kong’s affairs as its way to disrupt the autonomous status of the HKSAR. As a result, public discontent has further intensified and created the legitimacy crisis for the HKSAR Government.

This paper is the first academic paper to provide a critical analysis of Hong Kong’s localists’ views regarding Hong Kong’s political development since becoming the HKSAR. In contrast with the existing literature about Hong Kong’s democratization and political development, this paper introduces localists’ views and advocates the idea of “reverse democratization” to explain their perceptions concerning Hong Kong’s political development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine firms’ early adoption decision regarding new practices, and what social factors – that is social status and political legitimacy – may influence decision processes under ambiguity.

The study examines outside director presence among publicly listed firms in China between 1991 and 2000, using discrete time – event history analysis based on observation of 770 firms.

Social status negatively influences early adoption decisions through the expectation of status enhancement, while political legitimacy is also influential because early adoptions are more attractive to firms in need of political access. Moreover, a firm’ political legitimacy moderates the effect of social status, due to their resource dependence on different stakeholders.

This study’s findings provide important insights for research on diffusion models of new practices by identifying the social processes during early diffusion, and articulating different effects of status and legitimacy. It further emphasizes the sociopolitical perspectives and social motives of governance structure changes in emerging economies.

The contribution starts out from the question whether the political legitimacy of the Third Wave democracies has suffered in the wake of the Great Recession. The expectation of a damaging effect of an economic or political crisis on legitimacy is based on Lipset’s assumption that established democracies with a high degree of political legitimacy are better capable of coping with such crises than young democracies. The database includes two surveys of members of parliament conducted in 2007 and 2013 in Sweden, Germany and five Third Wave democracies located in different world regions (Chile, South Korea, Poland, South Africa and Turkey). Waves 5 and 6 of the World Values Survey that were conducted at about the same time were used for comparing the legitimacy beliefs among MPs and citizens. The data show that the scores for all indicators of political legitimacy are higher among MPs than among citizens and that the differences between the two groups of respondents are considerably larger in the five young democracies. Confidence in political parties is fairly low, especially among citizens, while the evaluation of the quality of democracy in the respondents’ country is much higher. Both evaluations have been rather stable over time. In the two established democracies, support for democracy among citizens is nearly as high as among MPs. In the five young democracies, the MP-citizen differential is larger and support for democracy in the population shows a steady increase only in Chile, while it has remained low in Poland and Turkey and even decreased in Korea and South Africa. This indicates that democracy has not taken deep roots in four of the five new democracies included in the study. In Korea and South Africa, the decline in support for democracy started already before the onset of the economic crisis and therefore cannot be attributed to the recession. This is confirmed by the lack of a statistical relationship between political legitimacy on one side and economic evaluations on the other side. A multiple regression analysis shows strong country-specific effects, while individual-level variables have only minor effects.

There are no management decisions deprived of ethical or political consequences. Political corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been highlighting this assertion but research at the microlevel on this topic is scarce. This study aims to contribute to the microlevel research by proposing a behavioral framework where leaders’ political skills are determinants of engagement in strategic CSR and perceived CSR leverages their ascribed legitimacy to perform a political role outside the boundaries of the organizations.

Building upon political CSR and critical realism theories, this study offers a general review on key political CSR microlevel concepts and examines multiple dimensions of CSR to explain the indirect effect between boards' political skills and political legitimacy.

This research suggests that high politically skilled leaders are associated to more CSR adoption which fosters higher legitimacy to act as political influencers. Among these, CSR activities directed toward community members and employees are seemingly the most successful from a political standpoint.

This study proposes a contemporary form of political influence to business leaders that, in contrast with other strategies such as lobbying or financing political campaigns, does not end up damaging corporate image and reputation. Also, this study proposes that not all CSR activities leverage corporate political legitimacy per se, therefore they do need to be differentiated. This study then offers a comprehensive future research agenda, including detailed suggestions for research designs and measurements.

The increasing uptake of performance auditing (PA), which entails both the facilitation and the control of government policies, has seriously challenged state auditors' claims that they are apolitical. This article aims to understand how supreme audit institutions (SAIs) operate to maintain and nurture the political neutrality and legitimacy of their PA.

The authors draw on Suchman's typology on legitimacy (1995) to analyze the PA reports of two countries with a long history of both performance auditing and accusations of political interference, namely Canada and Denmark. Documentary analysis and interview methods are employed.

This study shows how the two SAIs have been pursuing pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimacy through the professionalization and standardization of both the form and the content of their PA reports. Engaging and maintaining the dialogue with the audited administration, triangulating recognized social science methods, and emphasizing the “public interest” basis of PA reflect some of the tools adopted to navigate the “grey zone” between objective, relevant and politically sensitive audits.

The paper's explorative approach limits the possibility for robust testing of the causal forces impinging on SAIs' choices of legitimation strategies. Nevertheless, variations between the Canadian and Danish SAIs in the strategic use of some legitimacy tools such as the media suggest a difference in the role of Public Accounts Committee in the two countries that can be investigated in future research.

Much research exists questioning the political neutrality of PA, yet there has not been much discussion on how SAIs have been able to develop and preserve the prevalent legitimacy of their PA amid the criticism. More specifically, our research reveals the tendency of both the Canadian and Danish SAIs to strategically underline the “public interest” dimension of their performance audits in an attempt to increase both their legitimacy and political neutrality.