Stability, legitimacy, and bargaining

Abstract

Legitimacy is a very elusive concept, frequently used, but rarely defined precisely. In his overview of theories of legitimacy, Morris Zelditch Jr. attempts to extract the most general meaning of legitimation and legitimacy, arriving at the following conclusion:

• “Legitimation is a kind of auxiliary process that explains the stability of any sort of structure, at any level, that emerges and is maintained by any other basic social process. Because the dependent variable differs from process to process and from level to level, there appears to be no unique dependent variable associated with legitimation process, except that legitimacy is always a matter of voluntarily accepting that something is “right”, and its consequence is always the stability of whatever structure emerges from the process.”