State Legitimacy: A Multidimensional Approach

Camille Sutter

Working Paper from Agence française de développement

Abstract: This paper intends to develop a multidimensional measure of state legitimacy that provides original information on the interaction between a country’s polity and its social fabric. An index of state legitimacy is presented, stressing the institutional and political conditions for human dignity and human development, through the level of adherence (the legitimation process) of the people. Our approach strives to combine a universalist standpoint and a particularist view. An initial minimal threshold — related to elementary (fundamental) legitimacy — is the implementation of the “do no harm” principle by state power: how the physical integrity of all citizens is respected. Two dimensions are then considered: inherited legitimacy looks at the historical evolution of the relationship between state and society and is related to procedural fairness criteria: ways of access to power, existence of shared norms and values in society (concerning the political culture), and existence of a common language. Acquired legitimacy is related to the quality of public goods and institutions that help shape the recognition of a state by the population and deals with substantial fairness criteria: access to basic public goods (water, health, education, environment), respect of diversity/minority rights, quality of law enforcement (and fight against corruption).

JEL-codes: Q (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34
Date: 2017-11-30
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Research Papers

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.afd.fr/sites/afd/files/imported-files/25-papier-recherche.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:avg:wpaper:en7744

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper from Agence française de développement Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AFD ().