LEGITIMATION CRISIS

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2009

Legitimation crisis is a condition during which a political order, or government, is unable to evoke sufficient commitment or sense of authority to properly govern.

The government, or those in authority, is no longer seen as legitimate. Low levels of voter turnout in the United States, for example, may be seen as an indicator of a legitimation crisis.

From a political economy perspective the major source of the legitimation crisis is the economic transformation of the world in conjunction with what is termed ‘globalization’.

This transformation raises the possibility that citizens will see the economic system with its growing class polarization and impoverishment as illegitimate as well as the governments that attempt to regulate this new world economic order.

Jürgen Habermas and the Idea of Legitimation Crisis, RAYMOND PLANT
Abstract: This paper explores one aspect of the recent work of Jürgen Habermas on Legitimation Crisis. It focuses attention on Habermas's claim that the pre-capitalist moral values on which capitalism has hitherto relied have become progressively displaced by the growth of the capitalist economy. This has produced central problems for the state management of the economy, in the absence of an established internalized set of values which could act both as restraints upon economic demands and as reinforcements to an ethic of work. Various attempts to solve this problem proposed by Hayek and Luhman are discussed together with Habermas's own proposal for a rational consensus view of morality which could lead to a new Sittlichkeit.

A Cautionary Tale: Globalization and Legitimation Crisis in the Rule of Law in the United States, KENNETH M. CASEBEER, University of Miami - School of Law 
Abstract: Globalization creates a crisis for the future of democracy in the United States. 
1. U.S. law schools consistently treat international and transnational law as add-ons to the curriculum. This leaves graduates unaccustomed to the relationship between future trade and investment targeting skilled and educated regional labor pools. 
2. The current Supreme Court interpretations of the federalism in the U.S. Constitution create a barrier to full democratic representation in Nation-State negotiation and foreign policy. 
3. As a result of this political economy, the preservation of democracy within the United States suffers from growing disbelief in the rule of law. 
4. The judicial coup by the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, therefore, requires both curricular reform and methodic institution of critical oppositional norms and methods to regain democratic legitimation of the rule of law.

Legitimation crisis in the later work of Jürgen Habermas
Joseph Heath, Université de Montréal - chass.utoronto.ca/~jheath/legitimation.pdf
Most political theorists became acquainted with the work of Jürgen Habermas through his 1973 publication of Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (which became available in English two years later as Legitimation Crisis). In this work, Habermas argued that the traditional Marxist analysis of crisis tendencies in the capitalist system was outdated, given the relative success of the welfare-state compromise. He claimed instead that crisis tendencies generated in the economic sphere would be displaced, via state action, into the cultural sphere. This would in turn create problems of social integration, undermining many of the resources that the state requires for its ongoing management of the economy. In particular, it creates the possibility of a large-scale loss of legitimacy for government institutions.
Even though this thesis was not especially new, Habermas’s analysis offered the promise of a more rigorous formulation of the mechanism through which these undesirable cultural side-effects would be generated. However, Habermas billed his discussion in Legitimation Crisis as only a set of “programmatic” suggestions. Despite being provocative, they were in no sense articulated at a satisfactory level of detail. Unfortunately, despite the fact that Habermas has gone on to a considerable refinement of his broadly sociotheoretic views, he has never returned to an explicit treatment of the principal issues raised in Legitimation Crisis. Nevertheless, through a number of brief discussions that appear in his later work, it is possible to piece together an understanding of how the central thesis of this work would be reformulated, given his more considered views.
In this paper, I trace the development of Habermas’s analysis of legitimation problems from the time of Legitimation Crisis, through The Theory of Communicative Action, to his recent Between Facts and Norms, and use this to reconstruct and evaluate an updated version of his crisis thesis.1 Habermas’s position in Legitimation Crisis, I argue, is characterized by two central commitments that are dropped in his later work: a version of late-Parsonian systems theory, and a broadly Lukácsian view of cultural modernity. I describe briefly the problems that Habermas is able to resolve by abandoning these commitments, and sketch out the reconstructed version of his crisis analysis that appears in The Theory of Communicative Action. Finally, I show how the concept of “communicative power” introduced in Between Facts and Norms enables him to establish far more precisely the relationship between the lifeworld and the polity.


Public Broadcasting in Canada - Legitimation Crisis and the Loss of Audience - Paul Attallah 
Public broadcasting in Canada has met with separate fates depending on which language group constituted its main audience. While the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has suffered an erosion of audiences and credibility, leading to a legitimation crisis, Société Radio-Canada (SRC) has remained relatively strong and popular. The difference is due to the way in which the two audiences originally integrated the new medium into their overall cultural patterns, created infrastructures and adopted or rejected new programming styles. Additionally, public broadcasting has been subjected to ongoing political pressure, which has contributed to its marginalization. While Canadian public broadcasting is sometimes looked upon as a model for resisting American influence, reconciling cultural differences, or competing internationally, it faces an uncertain future with few allies. - gaz.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/62/3-4/177

Process Over Product: The Legitimation Crisis in Contemporary Popular Music.
Charlie Bertsch, English Department, University of Arizona
Abstract: In the 25th issue of The Believer magazine from the summer of 2005, Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein interviews the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' lead singer Karen O. Appearing in the context of the publication's second ''Music Issue,'' the piece is particularly interesting for the way it blurs the distinction between journalist and artist that grounds most popular music criticism. But this blurring is sometimes accompanied by a relimning of other distinctions. At one point, the two women are discussing their frustrations with the extremely formulaic way in which record albums are promoted, regardless of whether they are guaranteed million sellers or tiny ''indie'' releases. ''The process has superseded the music,'' remarks O. Picking up on this narrative of decline, Brownstein shifts the focus:
Because of the internet, everybody's a critic. It's like people listen to the records so then they can get on their blog and write their own reviews. It's so reportorial. I feel like it's less and less about one's individual relationship to the music and more about being the first person to have an opinion about it.
In other words, Brownstein redirects attention from a process controlled by insiders – record label executives, PR teams, professional music critics – to one led by outsiders, the amateurs who bypass industry mechanisms. Both women conjure visions of a ''Golden Age'' of popular music when the process hadn't superseded the product, yet provide different assessments for the cause of its decline. 
Taking the tension between O and Brownstein's critiques as a starting point, my paper argues that there is a crisis of legitimation in the world of popular music that metonymically figures broader problems within the arena of contemporary cultural production. After briefly mentioning their conversation, I discuss Max Weber's understanding of legitimation as well as Jürgen Habermas's elaboration upon it in Legitimation Crisis, then show how Walter Benjamin's thesis in ''The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'' can be read as an argument about the advantages and disadvantages that ensue when it's possible for everybody to be a critic. Returning to the present, I consider other cases where the roles of artist, critic, and fan get confused and the attempts that people afraid of that confusion have made to sort things out in the new mediascape of the post-internet era. I then deploy the work that Pierre Bourdieu and scholars working in his footsteps have done on the relationship between taste and class to explore the stakes in attempts to preserve or restore an ''aura'' for both cultural artifacts and the promotional process that factors so heavily in their distribution. In the end, I conclude that the critiques advanced by artists such as O and Brownstein would be more effective if they were extricated from the ''progessivist'' logic that underpins narratives of both ascent and decline. - csaus.pitt.edu

The PetroChina Syndrome: Regulating Capital Markets in the Anti-Globalization Era
Abstract: This article argues that the process of globalization has generated a legitimation deficit that can be the source of wasteful, even destructive, social and political conflict. I stylize this outcome as "the PetroChina Syndrome," after a leading example of the kind of activity generated in response to globalization, the PetroChina Campaign, where a coalition of labor, human rights, environmental, anti-slavery and religious groups worked together to oppose the initial public offering of a major Chinese oil company led by Goldman Sachs. The article begins with a discussion of this important but largely unexplored dimension of the anti-globalization era triggered by the 1999 demonstrations in Seattle against the World Trade Organization. The Campaign and its impact are discussed in detail. I then examine three possible arguments that shed some light on this development, including traditional securities law approaches, the broader political context and, finally, structural changes in corporate finance. These three arguments, I argue, are helpful but not sufficient. Recent work by the economist Massimo De Angelis on John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman helps us shape an alternative explanation rooted in understanding changes in the institutional mechanisms of the global labor and capital markets. The displacement of the trade union and collective bargaining by globalization has pushed organized labor and other groups to look to political intervention in the capital markets as an alternative means to establish legitimacy. This intervention should be encouraged to develop new institutions to respond to the growing legitimation crisis of global capitalism. - ideas.repec.org/p/bep/cornel/cornell_clsops-1012.html