Mapping the Ties That Bind

Legitimacy, Representation, and Alienation

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3501574
AutoresM Stephen Weatherford (University of California, Santa Barbara, autor de correspondencia)
Año1991
Volumen44
Número2
Páginas251-276
Fecha de publicación1991-06-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Western Political Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0043-4078 • E-ISSN: 2325-8675
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/106591299104400202
OpenAlexW2171553091
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas66
Referencias citadas53

any of the most worthwhile theoretical and methodological challenges social scientists face spring from phenomena that link different levels of aggregation. For some concepts, the system-level manifestation is the summation of properties of individuals aggregate demand for a product or district partisanship, for instance. For these, the challenge is in properly formulating the aggregation rule that produces the social choice. The difficulty of this task should not be underestimated, but its practitioners do begin from a single, consensual perspective methodological individualism and this facilitates coherent theorizing by grounding key concepts in a common foundational assumption. Other multi-level constructs lack this characteristic feature. Legitimacy is a paradigmatic example, a systemlevel property that has no direct individual-level counterpart. Research on legitimacy is particularly difficult because the key decision, choosing the right theoretical perspective, presents a dilemma for which there is no necessarily correct solution. Proponents of a macro viewpoint note that evaluating a political system's claim to legitimacy depends on the presence of constitutional guarantees of access and equality, properties that can be competently judged by an outside observer. Moreover, they warn that popular support is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for legitimacy, since history shows examples of regimes widely judged legitimate that were overthrown and others that retained their incumbency through manipulation or force in spite of being clearly illegitimate. But proponents of the individuallevel perspective also have a strong claim to define how legitimacy should be conceptualized and research on it organized. Even the most

Alienation · Dilemma · Economics · Epistemology · Individualism · Law and economics · Legitimacy · Perspective (graphical) · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Property (philosophy) · Representation (politics) · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Computer Science · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Globalization and political ideologies · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Religion and Society Interactions · Social and Cultural Dynamics · Social Policy and Reform Studies · Social Psychology