In this paper, we present a new heuristic for thinking about legitimacy, sensitive not only to institutional specifics (in a ‘practice-dependent’ manner), but also to various factors of the context from within which a decision about the legitimacy of an institution is to be made. We argue that these ‘context-dependent’ factors are relevant to (i) who makes the legitimacy judgement, (ii) how they do it, procedurally speaking, and (iii) under which normative constraints. Context-dependence enjoins more ‘liberal’ approaches to legitimacy in some political circumstances, and more ‘realist’ approaches in others. It is neither necessary nor appropriate to choose, in a definitive fashion, between liberal and realism as the single best way to think about legitimacy.
The paper proceeds by building on Allen Buchanan’s ‘Metacoordination View’ of legitimacy, which we explicate in the first section. While generally sympathetic to the approach, we see the idea of “metacoordination” to be underspecified across three dimensions, which we set out in the second section: constituency; normative framework; and procedure. These dimensions admit of more ‘liberal’ and more ‘realist’ interpretations. In the third section, we suggest that how best to fill in these dimensions in any one instance will be sensitive to the political context in which the metacoordination process is to occur. Paying attention to this sensitivity, we can anticipate how the process of metacoordination can lead to different legitimacy judgements in different political contexts, even for institutions that are themselves otherwise similar.
