Authority and Legitimacy

Authority and Legitimacy

By: Krisna Mendoza

     Authority is the government power. Authority can be used in many ways like some people used it to force other people to do things they don’t want to do but in politics authority is based in two general agreements. The first agreement is that a person or a group has the right to issue certain sort of commands. The second one is that those commands should be obeyed.

     In society, many people or individuals may have few amount of authority in some way but states and governments have the highest authority in a society. So authority is socially accepted. In some cases governments have no limits on their authority, there are called self – imposed limits on the authority. Two important self imposed limits are: constitutions and the principle of separation of powers. Authority is backed by the threat of coercion or by persuasion.

     The mass feeling that the governmental authority is rightful and should be obeyed is called legitimacy. There are four sources of legitimacy: by result, by habit, by historical, religious or ethnic identity and by procedure.  The first one is legitimacy by result this provides the basic needs of an individual such as welfare, security and the respect of human rights. An example would be Hitler achieved this legitimacy by getting big amount of employment and a god economic growth. The second one is by habit and is that people through time get used to obey the laws of the government. An example is that a government remains legitimate unless a compelling alternative comes along.

    The third one is by historical, religious or ethnic identity.  This means that legitimacy can come from various historical, religious or ethnic sources. George Washington is called “father of his country”, the congress party in India and the National liberation front in Algeria are examples of historical role that retained the ruling of high level of legitimacy.  The last one is legitimacy by procedure that is procedures that can promote and provide legitimacy. An example is in democracies when rulers are chosen by people for a certain period.

        The democratic citizen should have four qualities that are: tolerance, active participation, high level of interest and information and support for the state. How well are these requirements met in modern democracies? Tolerance is pretty low in modern democracies, an active participation by voting regularly, people have high level of interest and a lot of information and gets a lot support of the state with different services.

Social capital is the voluntary involvement in organizations that increase people’s tolerance, information, active participation, security, welfare and respect of human rights.  If many people volunteer and participate in civic engagements this would make a huge impact on the efficiency of democracy.  The political culture consists of beliefs that form the basis of political behavior. This very complex topic but political history is like history, it changes slowly and help us understand the context of political decisions and choices.  Religion is an important part of political culture, because is set of ideas about our creation and the ethical and moral imperatives that flow from that relationship.

      The political socialization is when people acquire and accumulate their values and assumptions about politics through it.  Political socialization is a learning process that most of the political values are learned in the early adulthood by the older people. There are various agents of socialization like family, school and peer groups.

This chapter talks about mainly of authority and legitimacy. For a state to function effectively need both authority and legitimacy. The ideal “democratic citizen” needs tolerance, active participation, interest of information and support of the state to be effective. And religion is considered a political culture.