Power without Force by Jackman Robert W.;

Author:Jackman, Robert W.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

CHAPTER 5

Legitimacy and Political Capacity

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In chapter 4, I argued that organizational age is a central element of institutionalization. But this is only half of the picture. I turn now to the other key element, which centers on the legitimacy of national political organizations. Legitimacy is fundamental to political life because it reflects the degree to which those who seek to rule (i.e., to exercise power) are accepted by the ruled. It thus identifies the nature of the relationship between rulers and ruled.

Because age itself impinges directly on legitimacy, the two elements are intertwined. Even in Weber’s original formulation, for example, traditional organizations gain their authority from the perception that they have always been there. In broad terms, then, traditional institutions are accepted as legitimate precisely because of their age: the people subject to them accede to the authority of those institutions because they cannot conceive of a viable alternative. With age comes habit.

More recent studies have pursued a similar point. For example, an analysis of the liability of newness among voluntary organizations concludes that new organizations are more fragile in good measure because they lack legitimacy, conceived as recognition by other organizations (Singh, Tucker, and House 1986). Defined in such terms, this argument can be applied to the legitimacy of nation-states as juridical units (Jackson and Rosberg 1982a). That is, nation-states are legal entities of a wider state system, most members of which have an ongoing interest in preserving the system as it exists and from which they benefit. Because of this, most states are legitimate in the sense that their sovereignty is internationally recognized, which is reflected in their membership in various international and transnational organizations.

The bearing of age alone on legitimacy becomes less clear when the discussion is broadened so that states are conceived as political units with varying degrees of domestic capacity. Revolutions offer the most dramatic reminder that old orders can collapse, but institutional disintegration is not uncommon even in the absence of full-scale revolution. The possibility of such an outcome is, of course, anticipated in analyses of the liability of newness. Those analyses do not, after all, claim that age assures immortality. Instead, they conclude more modestly (and more accurately) that the probability of organizational collapse decreases with age, but this probability never approaches zero (e.g., Starbuck 1965, 1983).

Since age reduces but does not eliminate organizational fragility, we need to expand our conception of national political capacity. Such an expansion entails explicit attention to the other ingredient of capacity—legitimacy. My purpose in this chapter is to argue that the analysis of political capacity cannot be divorced from issues of political legitimacy.

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