Operationalizing Legitimacy

Legitimacy is widely invoked as a condition, cause, and outcome of other social phenomena, yet measuring legitimacy is a persistent challenge. This article synthesizes existing approaches to conceptualizing legitimacy across the social sciences to identify widely agreed upon definitional properties, and builds on these points of consensus to develop a generalizable approach to operationalization. Legitimacy implies specific relationships among three empirical elements: an object of legitimacy, an audience that confers legitimacy, and a relationship between the two. Together, these empirical elements constitute a dyad (i.e., a single unit consisting of two nodes and a tie). I identify three necessary conditions for legitimacy—expectations, assent, and conformity—that specify how elements of the dyad interact. I detail how these conditions can be used to empirically establish legitimacy (and illegitimacy), distinguishing it from dissimilar phenomena that may appear similar in their empirical manifestations. I elaborate the advantages of approaching the measurement of legitimacy in this way. Followed to its logical conclusion, this operationalization has important implications for understanding the effects of legitimacy. I discuss these implications, and how they inform debates over the relevance of legitimacy for explaining socially significant outcomes.