Legitimacy (political) - Sources of Legitimacy

Sources of Legitimacy

The German economist and sociologist Max Weber identified three sources of political legitimacy.

• Charismatic authority derived from the leader’s charisma, based upon the perception that he or she possesses supernatural attributes, e.g. a clan chieftain, a priestess, or an ayatollah.

• Traditional authority derived from tradition, wherein the governed populace accept that form of government as legitimate because of its longevity by customs, e.g. monarchy.

• Rational–legal authority derived from the popular perception that the government's power derives from established law and custom (a political constitution), e.g. representative democracy.

Moreover, like the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Weber proposed that societies behave cyclically in governing themselves with different types of governmental legitimacy. That democracy was unnecessary for establishing legitimacy, a condition that can be established with codified laws, customs, and cultural principles, not by means of popular suffrage. That a society might decide to revert from the legitimate government of a rational–legal authority to the charismatic government of a leader, e.g. the Nazi Germany of Adolf Hitler, Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini, and fascist Spain under General Francisco Franco.

The French political scientist Mattei Dogan’s contemporary interpretation of Max Weber’s types of political legitimacy (traditional, charismatic, legal-rational) proposes that they are conceptually insufficient to comprehend the complex relationships that constitute a legitimate political system in the twenty-first century. Moreover Prof. Dogan proposed that traditional authority and charismatic authority are obsolete as forms of contemporary government, e.g. the Islamic Republic of Iran (est. 1979) rule by means of the priestly Koranic interpretations by the Ayatollah Khomeini. That traditional authority has disappeared in the Middle East; that the rule-proving exceptions are Islamic Iran and Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, the third Weber type of political legitimacy, rational–legal authority exists in so many permutations no longer allow it to be limited as a type of legitimate authority.