TY - JOUR

T1 - Legitimate governance in international politics

T2 - Towards a relational theory of legitimation

AU - Minatti, Wolfgang

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The British International Studies Association.

PY - 2024

Y1 - 2024

N2 - How do governing actors in international politics become legitimised? Current approaches to the study of legitimation do not fully account for the complexities of governance in contemporary international and global politics because they pre-specify 'sources' of legitimacy and treat change in audience expectations towards rightful rule as exogenous to legitimation processes. Instead, this article synthesises existing models of legitimation with relational theory to argue that constellations of institutional complexities necessitate an analytical focus on audiences and their expectations as embedded in governance networks. It then provides a relational theory of legitimation, emphasising the mechanisms undergirding legitimation: legitimation should be conceptualised as a process of congruence-finding between actors' normative expectations. A governance relation might be influenced towards greater or lesser congruence via several mechanisms working at the level of the relation and the wider network, with more congruence giving rise to stabler governance practices. In this way, the theory builds upon legitimation scholarship by developing pathways to investigate legitimation across the varied contexts of international politics: it avoids a normative background theory of legitimacy sources and provides an improved framework for understanding change in the legitimacy of institutions over time by considering endogenous mechanisms of legitimation.

AB - How do governing actors in international politics become legitimised? Current approaches to the study of legitimation do not fully account for the complexities of governance in contemporary international and global politics because they pre-specify 'sources' of legitimacy and treat change in audience expectations towards rightful rule as exogenous to legitimation processes. Instead, this article synthesises existing models of legitimation with relational theory to argue that constellations of institutional complexities necessitate an analytical focus on audiences and their expectations as embedded in governance networks. It then provides a relational theory of legitimation, emphasising the mechanisms undergirding legitimation: legitimation should be conceptualised as a process of congruence-finding between actors' normative expectations. A governance relation might be influenced towards greater or lesser congruence via several mechanisms working at the level of the relation and the wider network, with more congruence giving rise to stabler governance practices. In this way, the theory builds upon legitimation scholarship by developing pathways to investigate legitimation across the varied contexts of international politics: it avoids a normative background theory of legitimacy sources and provides an improved framework for understanding change in the legitimacy of institutions over time by considering endogenous mechanisms of legitimation.

KW - global governance

KW - International Relations

KW - legitimacy

KW - legitimation

KW - relationalism

KW - theory

KW - Politics

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85187396224&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1017/S0260210524000111

DO - 10.1017/S0260210524000111

M3 - Journal articles

AN - SCOPUS:85187396224

VL - 50

SP - 662

EP - 681

JO - Review of International Studies

JF - Review of International Studies

SN - 0260-2105

IS - 4

ER -