Legitimacy adds positive value to political authority and obligation. Discuss. (20m) (UPSC CSE Mains 2024- Political Science and International Relations, Paper 1)
- Political legitimacy is often identified with a ‘right to rule, where this is understood as correlated with an obligation to obey on the part of those subject to the authority’.
- Legitimacy is defined as the belief that a rule, institution, or leader has the right to govern. It is a judgment by an individual about the rightfulness of a hierarchy between rule or ruler and its subject and about the subordinate’s obligations toward the rule or ruler. When shared by many individuals, legitimacy produces distinctive collective effects in society, including making collective social order more efficient, more consensual, and perhaps more just.
- If authorities “are not viewed as legitimate, social regulation is more difficult and costly”. This accounts for the interest rulers show in legitimating their rule. Legitimation is the process by which actors strive to create legitimacy for a rule or ruler. Where legitimacy as a belief is a subjective and an individualistic quality, legitimation is a process that is inherently social and political. Actors and institutions constantly work to legitimize their power, and challengers work to delegitimate it.
- Without legitimation of state power, the alternative is the use of physical force or terror to enforce the orders of the state. In a democratically structured society, state power is legitimate when
(a) the power to rule the people is given by the people, and is exercised with the consent of the majority of the people – this would mean that those who exercise power are elected directly or indirectly by the people for a limited period only, and also when a system of control is in place
(b) when the state power is exercised corresponding to the principles stated in the constitution of the land, especially those relating to legality.
- The obedience to a government is not merely a legal phenomenon. It is also a political one. People obey a law more because of the fact that they feel it is good to obey it, as also because, they are convinced that the government issuing the laws is a legitimate one. In fact, no one would like to obey a government which one feels is not a legitimate one. The obedience to the government is more of a political phenomenon than a legal one. If one stands up to disobey the government, it is because one does not want to obey the government. If obedience is voluntary, so is the unwillingness to obey the laws.
- In practice, we see many instances in which citizens believe that their governments are illegitimate and this creates a serious crisis in governance. All systems experience problems of crises relating to legitimation and obligation. No system, in fact, is free from crises at one time or the other, with one factor or several factors responsible for such crises. Crises occur, whether they relate to challenging the legitimacy of the government or people’s obligation to obey the laws of the state, not because of the casual/accidental changes in the environment, but because of the “structurally inherent systems – imperatives that are incompatible and cannot be hierarchically integrated”. Referring to the advanced capitalist societies, Habermas says that such societies experience four levels of crises: economic, rationality, legitimation and motivation.
- Example: - Syrian Civil war in recent times is a question of Poilitical obligation coupled with delegitimation and fall of authority.
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