How Democratic is the Legitimacy of the Nation State?

Abstract

Our first foray into the empirical material, as presented in Chapter 3, has yielded few, if any, unequivocal indications for a legitimacy crisis in the public spheres of the four countries examined. Contrary to the claims advanced by much of the recent literature on globalization and its impact on the democratic nation state, we found little evidence for substantial scepticism towards these political systems and their basic structures or norms. So far, however, our argumentation has been centred on one specific understanding of legitimacy crises, namely, that such crises unfold, or must be diagnosed, if the volume and share of delegitimating communication increases beyond a given threshold. Where delegitimating evaluations of political systems and their institutional foundations come to prevail — and not just temporarily — we speak of an erosion or collapse of democratic legitimacy, that is, of type I or II legitimacy crises. The reference category of our typology is represented by the notion of secure democratic legitimacy — a state in which key legitimation objects, not least the political community and system as a whole, tend to be assessed positively, on the basis of democratic criteria of legitimation.