Significance of legitimacy

Significance of legitimacy:

Legitimacy is significant for all regimes. Legitimacy sustains political constancy as it establishes the reasonableness of a regime, or says, provide reason for the regime to exist. Weber point out that regime must arouse legitimacy belief of the people if they tend to maintain their rule. Election, a significant element of democracy, is very important in the process of legitimization. Authoritarian regimes also tend to continue election, even non-competitive election. It is because election contributes to provide justification for the existence of a regime, thus consolidates its legitimacy (Heywood, 2002).

Another device for regime to get legitimacy is constitution. Being a set of rules which lays down a framework in which government and political activity are conducted, its legitimization function can be analysed on two ways. First, constitution is almost a prerequisite for a state to be recognized by other states, where the external legitimacy comes from. On the other hand, constitution can be used to promote respect and compliance among the domestic population, thus building up internal legitimacy.

According to Samuel Huntington, a regime with strong legitimacy must have three kinds of legitimacy (1993).

1. First is ideological legitimacy, that is, the value proposition of regime must be generally, voluntarily recognized by the people. Enforced ideological indoctrination is difficult to sustain such kind of legitimacy.
2. Second is procedure legitimacy. The formation, change and operation of regime must be checked by citizen's vote. The ruling authority is limited and restricted by constitution or legal procedures.
3. The third is performance legitimacy, which means that a regime supported by people should have satisfied performance.

For a regime that only based on single legitimacy, if her performance is unsatisfied, people may question the value and procedures which the regime based on, thus legitimacy crisis would occur. Therefore, he stated that economic crisis is a political barrier that makes difficult for authoritarian regimes to come across. It can be said that Political legitimacy is the people’s recognition and acceptance of the validity of the rules of their entire political system and the decisions of their rulers.