Legitimacy

Ambiguities of Political Success or Failure in East and Southeast Asia

This book documents the bases for a new view of legitimacy in general and in various parts of Asia, including China, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. The authors see legitimacy anywhere as always partial, rather than total, and somewhat measurable. Legitimacy is specifically political, rather than more vaguely socioeconomic. It can be a predicate of various sizes of collectivity, not just of a sovereign government, or of policies, or of leaders. It can be challenged by patriotism. Legitimacy derives not just from scientific norms or technocracy, even in modern times. It is a belief whose alternative (illegitimacy) people may often suppress in their minds until external situations change, bringing an unexpected cascade of altered legitimacy.

The volume is edited by Lynn White, a professor in the Woodrow Wilson School and Politics Department at Princeton. It throws light not only on modern changes of the process of political legitimization, but also on the correlates of that process in specific East and Southeast Asian countries.

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Sample Chapter(s)
Introduction – Dimensions of Legitimacy (222 KB)

Contents:

• Dimensions of Legitimacy (L White)
• Political Legitimacy in Malaysia: Regime Performance in the Asian Context (B Gilley)
• The Basis of Political Legitimacy in Late-Authoritarian Taiwan (D D Yang)
• Political Trust in China: Forms and Causes (Z Wang)
• Nationalism and the Problem of Political Legitimacy in China (J Seo)
• Political Legitimacy in Reform China: Between Economic Performance and Democratization (Y Zheng & L F Lye)
• Legitimating Rhetorics and Factual Economies in a South Korean Development Dispute (R Oppenheim)
• Policy Legitimacy as a Determinant of Policy Outputs: Japan's Case (T Sakamoto)

Readership: University academics and students, government administrators, and interested general readers.
Key Features:

• The contributors are academics from various disciplines; they find extensive areas of agreement despite methodological diversity
• The volume broaches a sensitive topic about which too few academics have recently written
• It finds empirical grounds for a new conceptualization of political legitimacy that relies on both statistical and interpretive research