Analyzing Legitimation Discourses -- Methodological Issues and Substantive Findings

Political struggle is not the least a struggle over the justifiability of policies, authorities, institutions, and regimes as a whole. Yet despite the ubiquity and important role of such debates, political science rarely views legitimacy as a contingent quality that is (re-)produced, withdrawn, or transformed in (de-)legitimation processes. Instead, legitimacy is mostly understood as a normative or juridical concept, and hence as a quality that may or may not be attributed to regimes or their component parts in line with the extent to which they comply with certain external (and objective) standards, such as democratic quality or legality. Where it is treated as an empirical phenomenon, legitimacy is usually examined (and measured) by way of public opinion research or the observation of (non-)compliant political behavior. Our panel seeks to explore the possibilities of a communicative perspective in the field of legitimacy research; political support will be examined as the always contested temporary outcome of discursive struggle. We thus start from the assumption that support is a function of a myriad of (de-)legitimation practices, rituals and strategies, most of which are essentially communicative in nature. The panel's papers will offer methodological groundwork for research into the communicative dimension of legitimation, and present findings from empirical studies on discourses related to the policies, authorities, or institutions of national and international political regimes, thus answering questions such as these: Which content and discourse analytical methods can be used to analyze legitimation discourses? Which are the most important arenas, who are their most prominent speakers, and what are their strategies? Which are the most common 'moves' to frame and legitimate policies, authorities, institutions, or regimes as a whole? Thus we seek papers that make a methodological or an empirical contribution to such questions rather than purely normative discussions of legitimacy and its foundations.