Democratic legitimacy : is there a legitimacy crisis in contemporary politics?
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0032-3470; 1862-2860
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Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 2013, Vol. 54, No. 4, pp. 609-638
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KRIESI, Hanspeter, Democratic legitimacy : is there a legitimacy crisis in contemporary politics?, Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 2013, Vol. 54, No. 4, pp. 609-638 - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/33990
Abstract
Against the background of a renewed debate about democratic legitimacy, this essay discusses its conceptualization, its development over time and space, as well as its driving forces. The conceptual discussion leads to a typology of four distinct bases of democratic legitimacy. Tracing their empirical scope and depth shows that democratic values are developing world-wide even in non-democracies, but that they are often shallow and badly understood. For established democracies, the empirical trends are not so much indicative of a continuous erosion of democratic legitimacy, but more compatible with equilibrium models that allow for performance-driven short- or medium term fluctuations of democratic legitimacy around stable equilibrium levels. These levels, in turn, are shifting as a function of long-term cultural trends and exogenous economic shocks like the current economic crisis.