The Decline of Political Legitimacy in Zambia

An Explanation Based on Incomplete Data

Bibliographic Data

ID2594565
AuthorsJames R Scarritt (corresponding author)
Year1979
Volume22
Issue2
Pages13
Publication date1979-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican Studies Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-0206 • E-ISSN: 1555-2462
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/523810
OpenAlexW2069500437
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited26

Zambia, like all African countries, is experiencing significant political, economic, and social change. The Zambian government and ruling party seek to control change and channel it in certain directions, but many aspects of change are not initiated by them and a substantial proportion of these are not to their liking. Politically initiated changes and government reactions to other changes have inevitably affected the legitimacy of the Zambian political system and its major components in the eyes of a wide variety of Zambians. In his contribution to the Social Science Research Council's volume on the crises of political development, Sidney Verba indicates that all such “crises of development” or problems associated with change “would seem always to involve problems of legitimacy as well as one of the other problem areas” (Verba, 1971: 306). Thus it is important to study the effects of change on legitimacy since they will be crucial in determining whether the Zambian government and ruling party will be successful in directing change into the paths they desire. Political legitimacy can be defined as a generalized appraisal of the political system as a whole, its various components, and the policy outputs they produce, which indicates that these objects are appropriate in terms of accepted values and norms. To define legitimacy as a generalized appraisal of appropriateness is to differentiate it from specific appraisals of political structures and policies made in terms of perceived interests. These two types of appraisals are empirically interdependent in the long run, but they can be independent of one another in the short run (Easton, 1965: 267-77). They tend, however, to be very closely related in most new political systems, where most diffuse bases of legitimacy have not had time to develop (Binder et. al., 1971: 90-91, 158, 194, 315-16). A complete description of legitimacy in a political system must indicate who grants what degree of legitimacy to what political objects on the basis of which values and norms

Development economics · Economics · Geography · Legitimacy · Political science · Politics · International Development and Aid · Law

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