essay on legitimate use of power

How it works

Transform your enterprise with the scalable mindsets, skills, & behavior change that drive performance.

Explore how BetterUp connects to your core business systems.

We pair AI with the latest in human-centered coaching to drive powerful, lasting learning and behavior change.

Build leaders that accelerate team performance and engagement.

Unlock performance potential at scale with AI-powered curated growth journeys.

Build resilience, well-being and agility to drive performance across your entire enterprise.

Transform your business, starting with your sales leaders.

Unlock business impact from the top with executive coaching.

Foster a culture of inclusion and belonging.

Accelerate the performance and potential of your agencies and employees.

See how innovative organizations use BetterUp to build a thriving workforce.

Discover how BetterUp measurably impacts key business outcomes for organizations like yours.

A demo is the first step to transforming your business. Meet with us to develop a plan for attaining your goals.

• What is coaching?

Learn how 1:1 coaching works, who its for, and if it's right for you.

Accelerate your personal and professional growth with the expert guidance of a BetterUp Coach.

Types of Coaching

Navigate career transitions, accelerate your professional growth, and achieve your career goals with expert coaching.

Enhance your communication skills for better personal and professional relationships, with tailored coaching that focuses on your needs.

Find balance, resilience, and well-being in all areas of your life with holistic coaching designed to empower you.

Discover your perfect match : Take our 5-minute assessment and let us pair you with one of our top Coaches tailored just for you.

Best practices, research, and tools to fuel individual and business growth.

View on-demand BetterUp events and learn about upcoming live discussions.

The latest insights and ideas for building a high-performing workplace.

• BetterUp Briefing

The online magazine that helps you understand tomorrow's workforce trends, today.

Innovative research featured in peer-reviewed journals, press, and more.

Founded in 2022 to deepen the understanding of the intersection of well-being, purpose, and performance

We're on a mission to help everyone live with clarity, purpose, and passion.

Join us and create impactful change.

Read the buzz about BetterUp.

Meet the leadership that's passionate about empowering your workforce.

For Business

For Individuals

Using legitimate power? The responsibility behind your role

Lead with confidence and authenticity

Develop your leadership and strategic management skills with the help of an expert Coach.

Jump to section

What is legitimate power?

What you should know about legitimate power, 3 examples of legitimate power, advantages of legitimate power, disadvantages of legitimate power, 4 tips to rock a legitimate power position, use your legitimate power for good.

Have you ever wondered why the president is allowed to live in the White House? Or why does your manager have the right to assign tasks to you?

These are both examples of legitimate power. In both instances, their power comes from the position they hold .

Along with the other types of power , it’s important for leaders to understand what legitimate power is. Only with a true understanding of this formal power can leaders use their power as a positive force in the workplace.

Let’s take a deeper look at what legitimate power is and how you can succeed in a legitimate power position.

Legitimate power is the formal authority given to a person within an organization. Because it comes from a position or job title, legitimate power is a form of positional power.

In any efficient system , there are different levels of power. This creates a sense of order and adds structure to the working environment .

Legitimate power is based on a person holding a particular position of authority within an organization. This gives them power over others and lets them make decisions  within the broader system.

Other different forms of power that are positional include reward power and coercive power .

Assigning legitimate power ensures that bigger responsibilities  are taken care of. Those in lower positions can then confidently focus on their own tasks.

Those in positions of legitimate power often take on a “parental” role within an organization. They are responsible for decision-making and executing plans that push the business forward.

However, the responsibility that comes with legitimacy is great, and has the potential for both good and bad.  Legitimate power is one thing. But legitimate power management is another.

It's important for effective leaders  to use their legitimate power in conjunction with personal types of power.

Expert power , informational power, charismatic power, and referent power are all effective forms of personal power.

Being in a position of power requires a high level of responsibility and leadership qualities .

While the concept of being powerful might initially seem appealing, it’s not always the case. People don’t often think of the finer details that come along with having so much control.

Here are four things to keep in mind when it comes to possessing legitimate power.

1. It is not for personal privilege

When power is chased purely for personal gain, the person chasing it can easily get lost in selfish whims and desires. People in positions of authority might lose sight of the greater good. Instead, they end up placing their focus on egotistical pursuits .

Legitimate power is a privilege. But it should never be used as a weapon for pushing oneself up at others’ expense.

2. Legitimate power alone doesn’t make you a good leader

Just because someone has power and authority does not necessarily mean they are a good leader at heart . A good leader aims to empower those around them  and pursue progress for all.

There are plenty of people with legitimate power in this world who neglect true leadership qualities. Instead, they embrace abuse or exploitation.

3. It can easily be lost

It can be easy to let power go to your head. But once that happens, you may start to take it for granted.

Many people in positions of legitimate power forget that they may lose it all if they cannot cope under the weight of responsibility.

If those in positions of authority cannot maintain a level head, everything they have worked to achieve may be lost.

Power is a fickle thing. As easily as it's awarded, it’s taken away. The ramifications of losing power are also far greater.

4. You still need to listen to others

The toxic leadership trait  of arrogance sometimes accompanies power. If you find yourself in a position of legitimate power management, it will require some effort to remain open to other people’s opinions and wishes.

A leader who does not listen to others  will only be resented over time.

Being a good leader  takes great communication skills . Good leaders are always willing to share the table and hear others out . They know how to truly hear what other people are saying and make them feel that they’ve been heard.

People in positions of legitimate power are all around us. In fact, you might even be one of them.

But what is legitimate power meant to look like?

The term may sound intimidating. But legitimate power is really just a description of any person with officiated authority in the workplace.

Even managerial roles  on the smaller side can be considered positions of power. The key elements here are power, authority, and influence over others .

Here are three legitimate power examples to help you gain a better understanding of what the position means.

A manager  is the perfect legitimate power example.

Typically in charge of a large group of employees, managers make sure everything runs smoothly. They ensure all problems are dealt with and solutions are found  and actioned.

Although it is not a corporate title, parents have legitimate power. Parents have authority over their children because of their title: parent.

Parents hold as much power as is legally possible over their child. They have unquestionable authority. Just think of the classic “Because I said so” response.

Because of their role in a young child’s life, parents have virtually full control over their child’s life. They have the power to give orders and to choose where their children go to school. They even control their children’s freedom of movement, for example by grounding them.

Teaching might not be the first profession that comes to mind when you think of power. But in reality, teachers play a significant role of authority and influence in society.

In fact, imparting valuable knowledge to younger generations requires a great deal of responsibility and strength.

Despite its high level of responsibility, there are many perks to being in a position of legitimate power.

When it comes to legitimate power management, you can choose to utilize the power in your possession to create positive change . This helps your work environment to flourish .

Here are some of the highlights and advantages of legitimate power in the workplace, as well as how you can use legitimate power to your benefit and the benefit of others.

1. Allows you to clearly see the hierarchy within a company

When you’re within the top half of a workplace hierarchy, you can see it more clearly. People who sit at the lower portion of the workplace hierarchy have much less control over it. This is often the reason behind their exploitation.

People who hold a high position of power are much more likely to possess a sharper comprehension of the system they are a part of.

2. Remains widely accepted

In most work environments, it is considered normal for direct reports to treat authoritative figures with unquestionable respect. This helps to maintain order.

But it also means that those with legitimate power very rarely have to worry about their orders not being followed.  

3. Gives you the ability to influence others

People with legitimate power shouldn’t use social influence tactics  for selfish pursuits. But this status does allow some room for enjoyment.

Legitimate power can give you the opportunity to flex your influence .

For example, you can help someone in need or create necessary changes within your work environment. You have the ability to achieve professional goals  that are beneficial to you and your team.

4. Allows you to get things done quickly and effectively

Your position of power can be utilized as a tool for overseeing difficult tasks with ease and efficiency.

Those in other positions may not have access to the resources or the social capital  that you do. This provides you with an opportunity to generate fast, effective progress.

Having power over others is not always easy. In fact, there are negative effects that come with maintaining a position of legitimate power management.

So what are the downsides to this kind of responsibility?

Anyone in a position of authority should be aware that these difficulties can sometimes accompany it.

1. Doesn’t prompt loyalty and respect

Not everyone who has power uses it well. This is why so many people have formed an instinctive sense of resentment or mistrust toward authoritative figures .

If you are in a position of power, even your best efforts to display integrity  might be met with contempt, making cooperation difficult.

2. Overuse can cause dissatisfaction and frustration

Nobody likes a dictator. But it can be hard to refrain from overexerting your legitimate power in moments of weakness.

Unfortunately, those who work for or beneath you are unlikely to cut you much slack.

It’s the role of authoritative figures to use their power. But overuse will only put a strain on relationships with your direct reports.

3. Can sometimes lead to ineffectiveness

There are many ways for legitimate power to be misused. One of them occurs when an inexperienced or under-qualified person accepts the position.

An under-skilled manager or boss is likely to make ineffective decisions. This causes disruption and delay instead of progress.

4. Can be easily abused

Many people who have power do not truly understand how or when to use it for good.

Unfortunately, abuse of power is difficult to resist and easy to perpetuate. Anyone who pursues a healthy relationship with legitimate power should be prepared to do battle with their conscience.

There may be a fair amount of responsibility that comes alongside legitimate power. But that does not mean that there aren’t ways to use it productively.

Everyone has the potential to be a great leader. With these four tips, anyone can rock a legitimate power position and pursue their future with integrity.

1. Understand your position

Maintaining a position of power requires an in-depth understanding of what your role is and why you are in that role.

The best leaders are people who form connections  with their colleagues. They never assume they know everything about their position.

If you want to be a good leader, treat your power and those who report to you with care and empathy .  

2. Use other types of power

There is more than one type of power in this world. You will need to incorporate several of them if you are going to lead a successful career.

Legitimate power management requires the power of communication , collaboration and teamwork .

The combination of all these attributes will help you gain respect and perform your duties with more efficiency.

3. Connect with your peers

Because of the negative associations that people often have with authoritative figures, those with power need to make a concerted effort to connect with their peers .

Without making a genuine effort to bond with the people you work with, being liked and admired will not come easy. Being approachable and open-minded will help you be a better leader.

4. Use resources for team goals

Each team member will want to see that you are using resources for the benefit of everyone. Not just yourself.

People will always watch to make sure that you’re not exploiting your power. But you can omit unwanted backlash by using resources fairly and with the future of everyone in mind.

If you strive toward common goals  in this way, your team will see this, respect you, and understand why you are in a position of authority.

It may seem daunting to know how to exercise power and influence in a healthy way. However, the recipe for success is simple. Use your leadership power to help your team grow and succeed .

Keep in mind that an effective leadership style shouldn’t depend solely on legitimate power. Instead, a leader uses it in combination with other styles in a constructive and progressive way.

For some, using legitimate power will come with some trial and error. But anyone can learn how to become a respected and successful leader. It takes time, experience, and some professional guidance.

If you find approaching powerful positions stressful, consider investing in expert coaching.

Book a session with one of BetterUp’s expert coaches . They can help you unlock your personal and professional potential.

Elizabeth Perry, ACC

Elizabeth Perry is a Coach Community Manager at BetterUp. She uses strategic engagement strategies to cultivate a learning community across a global network of Coaches through in-person and virtual experiences, technology-enabled platforms, and strategic coaching industry partnerships. With over 3 years of coaching experience and a certification in transformative leadership and life coaching from Sofia University, Elizabeth leverages transpersonal psychology expertise to help coaches and clients gain awareness of their behavioral and thought patterns, discover their purpose and passions, and elevate their potential. She is a lifelong student of psychology, personal growth, and human potential as well as an ICF-certified ACC transpersonal life and leadership Coach.

The 5 types of power effective leaders use

Power versus influence: how to build a legacy of leadership, power versus authority, why the difference matters, from self-awareness to self-control: a powerful leadership technique, what is referent power your guide as a leader, what is power and how does it affect workplace dynamics, inclusive leadership: a strategic competitive advantage, how to lead when the world is on fire, expert power: how to use it for good (not evil) in a changing world, similar articles, when managing direct reports, inclusive leadership matters, reward power in the workplace and how to motivate employees, how using different types of authority affects leadership, how to use power (of your position and your person) in the workplace, how to navigate office politics no matter where you work, stay connected with betterup, get our newsletter, event invites, plus product insights and research..

3100 E 5th Street, Suite 350 Austin, TX 78702

• Platform Overview
• Integrations
• Powered by AI
• BetterUp Lead
• BetterUp Manage™
• BetterUp Care™
• Sales Performance
• Diversity & Inclusion
• Case Studies
• Why BetterUp?
• About Coaching
• Find your Coach
• Career Coaching
• Communication Coaching
• Life Coaching
• News and Press
• Leadership Team
• Become a BetterUp Coach
• BetterUp Labs
• Center for Purpose & Performance
• Leadership Training
• Business Coaching
• Contact Support
• Contact Sales
• Privacy Policy
• Acceptable Use Policy
• Trust & Security
• Cookie Preferences

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Front Psychol

Authorities' Coercive and Legitimate Power: The Impact on Cognitions Underlying Cooperation

Eva hofmann.

1 Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University, Coventry, UK

2 Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Barbara Hartl

3 Institute of Organization and Global Management Education, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

Katharina Gangl

4 Institute of Psychology, Georg-August-University Goettingen, Goettingen, Germany

Martina Hartner-Tiefenthaler

5 Labor Science and Organization, Institute of Management Science, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

Erich Kirchler

Associated data.

The execution of coercive and legitimate power by an authority assures cooperation and prohibits free-riding. While coercive power can be comprised of severe punishment and strict monitoring, legitimate power covers expert, and informative procedures. The perception of these powers wielded by authorities stimulates specific cognitions: trust, relational climates, and motives. With four experiments, the single and combined impact of coercive and legitimate power on these processes and on intended cooperation of n 1 = 120, n 2 = 130, n 3 = 368, and n 4 = 102 student participants is investigated within two exemplary contexts (tax contributions, insurance claims). Findings reveal that coercive power increases an antagonistic climate and enforced compliance, whereas legitimate power increases reason-based trust, a service climate, and voluntary cooperation. Unexpectedly, legitimate power is additionally having a negative effect on an antagonistic climate and a positive effect on enforced compliance; these findings lead to a modification of theoretical assumptions. However, solely reason-based trust, but not climate perceptions and motives, mediates the relationship between power and intended cooperation. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Introduction

In a community, contributions to public goods are often obligatory (e.g., paying taxes in order to finance health services), but some individuals exploit the vulnerable system, refraining from participation, and consequently free ride (Marwell and Ames, 1979 ). Paying taxes and filing insurance claims are classic real world examples of the free-rider problem. Thus, communities employ regulating formal authorities (e.g., tax administration, insurance companies) with legal measures to persuade free-riders to follow their obligations and to contribute for the benefit of the community. Thereby, we define authorities as processes or individuals which organize the cooperation in a community by an assigned social position that allows to create and maintain environments and thereby influence the behavior of individuals (cf. Andringa et al., 2013 ). In the current article, we focus on formal authorities. Such authorities have different mechanisms to foster cooperation: the coercive power and the legitimate power (Andreoni et al., 1998 ; Braithwaite, 2009 ; Gangl et al., 2013 ). Employing coercive power, an authority manages behavior with strict monitoring and heavy punishment whereas by using the legitimate power approach, an authority operates through legitimacy of its position, expertise, a policy to disseminate relevant information, and its ability to make others identify with it (Andreoni et al., 1998 ; Braithwaite, 2009 ; Gangl et al., 2013 , 2015 ). The slippery slope framework (Kirchler et al., 2008 ; Gangl et al., 2015 ) postulates that the perception of both kinds of power stimulate cooperative behavior, but that the underlying cognitions differ.

We shed light on the cognitions that are elicited via coercive and legitimate power of authorities and in turn impact the intention to cooperate. Earlier research shows that coercive power and legitimate power both enhance cooperation in public good dilemmas, where individual interests collide with collective ones (Masclet et al., 2003 ; Tyler, 2006 ; Van Lange et al., 2013 ; Hartl et al., 2015 ). However, the actual underlying cognitions responsible for the increase in cooperation are not well-understood.

According to the slippery slope framework the perception of authorities' power is assumed to impact individuals' cognitions, such as trust in authorities (implicit and reason-based trust), the relational climate (antagonistic and service climate), and motives for contribution (enforced compliance, voluntary cooperation; Gangl et al., 2015 ). Implicit trust is diminished when authorities apply coercive power; in contrast, reason-based trust is strengthened by legitimate power. Coercive power induces an antagonistic climate between authorities and individuals. Legitimate power stimulates a service climate. Finally, coercive power leads to enforced compliance, and legitimate power results in voluntarily cooperation.

In this paper, we investigate the cognitions that operate when coercive and legitimate power are wielded to prohibit free-riding (e.g., tax evasion and insurance fraud). The study investigates how coercive power and legitimate power solely or in combination over perceptions of power influence trust in authorities, the climate between authorities and individuals, and the motives of cooperation. Additionally, it analyzes whether the cognitions such as trust, perceived relational climates or motives, mediate the relationship between power and intention to cooperate.

In the remainder of this article, the impact of coercive power and legitimate power on cooperation, trust, relational climates, and motives are defined. Three laboratory experiments in the tax context and one online experiment in the insurance context are described, each assessing the impact of power. Finally, we discuss the results and identify their theoretical and practical implications for legislation and law enforcement.

The impact of power on cooperation

Power is conceptualized as the capacity of an organization or person to influence another parties' behavior (e.g., Freiberg, 2010 ; Gangl et al., 2015 ). Following theory on power (cf. harsh vs. soft power in Raven et al., 1998 ; coercion vs. persuasion and authority in Turner, 2005 ; instrumental vs. normative in Tyler et al., 2010 ) we distinguish between two primary concepts of power, coercive power based on deterrence and legitimate power based on persuasion (Gangl et al., 2015 ). Coercive power is defined as “harsh” power, as the capacity to detect and sanction unlawful behavior (Raven et al., 1998 ; Turner, 2005 ). Legitimate power is defined as “soft” power and refers to the power of position, expertise, dissemination of relevant information, and identification (Raven et al., 1998 , cf. Tyler, 2006 ). Thus, legitimate power is defined by formal and informal rules established by a rightfully elected government (power of position), and by their knowledge about skillful procedures (power of expertise). In addition, information power and power of identification are seen as means of legitimate power, whereby information, for example, is given on how to behave in accordance with the law, and identification with the authority means that individuals identify with the ideas of the authority such as a specific political party.

Coercive power and legitimate power are two independent forms, which can be wielded exclusively or in combination (cf. French and Raven, 1959 ; Raven, 1992 , 1993 ; Raven et al., 1998 ). For instance, wielding coercive power by threatening severe sanctions for unwanted behavior alone is not enough to explain compliant and cooperative behavior (Fehr and Falk, 2002 ); underlying cognitions such as expectations (Copeland and Cuccia, 2002 ), reciprocity (Feld and Frey, 2007 ), and fairness (e.g., Hartner-Tiefenthaler et al., 2012 ) additionally encourage cooperation. In line with these aspects, we argue that legitimate power, such as distributing information about what the “morally” desired behavior is and the expertly handling of members' contributions to the communal good, becomes important. Empirical evidence shows that coercive power, as well as legitimate power, has a positive impact on cooperative behavior (e.g., Tyler et al., 2010 ; Hofmann et al., 2014 ; Hartl et al., 2015 ). An interaction effect of coercive and legitimate power on cooperation has not been found (e.g., Hofmann et al., 2014 ; Hartl et al., 2015 ). Nevertheless, theoretically we would expect that the combination of coercive power and legitimate power is affecting the cognitions underlying cooperative behavior via perception of power (Gangl et al., 2015 ). Thus, although cooperation might be the same, the underlying cognitions are supposed to be different.

Power and trust

The application of power is strongly related to trust, whereby trust means “to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party” (Mayer et al., 1995 , p. 712). However, the exact nature of the dynamics and relationship between power and trust is not clear. Power was shown to decrease but also to increase trust in authorities (Bachmann, 2001 ; Bijlsma-Frankema and Costa, 2005 ; Mulder et al., 2006 ; Weibel, 2007 ; Chenhall et al., 2010 ; Fu et al., 2013 ). One reason for the divergent results might be that the decision to trust can be either based on reasons or taken implicitly (Castelfranchi and Falcone, 2010 ), resulting in two forms of trust: implicit trust (system 1 trust) and reason-based trust (system 2 trust). Implicit trust is defined as an automatic and unintentional reaction to stimuli that are associated with positive past experiences or a shared identity. For instance, a taxpayer trusts implicitly in a tax authority, if s/he feels trust immediately without any considerations; this automatic reaction can stem from past positive experiences that ended in a learning process that the tax authority can be trusted. Reason-based trust is defined as a deliberate decision to trust another party based on the evaluation of the other parties' good intentions and internal and external fostering and hindering circumstances to comply with the good intentions (Castelfranchi and Falcone, 2010 ). Such as a taxpayer weighs whether a tax authority is to be trusted by considering whether the tax authority is pursuing a goal that is valuable to the taxpayer, whether the tax authority is acting motivated, benevolently, and competently, and whether there are external factors fostering or hindering the tax authority's actions.

The slippery slope framework argues that coercive power damages implicit trust (Gangl et al., 2015 ); as coercion signals authorities' distrust, it may weaken affective and social bonds with authorities, thereby interrupting habitual and implicit cooperation (Kramer, 1999 ; Das and Teng, 2001 ). Legitimate power, on the other hand, strengthens trust (Fu et al., 2013 ); when authorities are perceived as knowledgeable and legitimate in their position, reason-based trust increases. Perceived assistance by experts who work on a transparent legal basis provides many reasons to trust in the competence, motivation, and benevolence of authorities (Bijlsma-Frankema and Van de Bunt, 2002 ; Malhotra and Murnighan, 2002 ). For reason-based trust, a strong relationship with legitimate power is assumed because authorities with high levels of legitimate power are perceived as being competent to provide assistance and support (Gangl et al., 2015 ).

The direct impact of power on trust might in turn also impact cooperation. Thus, trust might be a mediator for the relationship between power and cooperation. However, up to now, most empirical research treats trust as a moderator of the impact of power on cooperation. A meta-analysis shows that power in a trusted environment leads to more cooperation than does power that is exerted in a low-trust environment (Balliet and Van Lange, 2013 ). Furthermore, experiments show that sanctions exerted by trusted authorities, compared to non-trusted authorities, evoke stronger moral judgments about free-riders (Mulder et al., 2009 ). There is empirical evidence that power also directly impacts trust (Kramer, 1999 ; Bijlsma-Frankema and Costa, 2005 ; Fu et al., 2013 ). Thus, we assume that trust is not only a moderator but also a mediator between power and cooperation. Coercive and legitimate power impact trust and might consequently influence cooperation with the authorities.

Power and relational climates

The slippery slope framework postulates that exerting power establishes specific relational climates, whereby climate is defined as the perceived quality of interaction between authorities and individuals (Victor and Cullen, 1988 ; Martin and Cullen, 2006 ). This is a “psychological climate that characterizes climate as an individual-level and personal perception” (Ehrhart et al., 2013 , p. 70). Two climates can be distinguished in relation to power, the antagonistic climate and the service climate (Kirchler et al., 2008 ; Gangl et al., 2015 ). Coercive power and negative experiences with authority trigger an aversive antagonistic climate in which distrust prevails. In such a climate, the authority convicts members of misconduct and suspects others as criminals. In turn, individuals hide from the authority, which justifies stricter controls and sanctions that intensify the vicious circle of distrust (Kirchler et al., 2008 ).

In contrast, legitimate power and positive impressions of the authorities' intents and work lead to a friendly relational climate in which the authority acts client-oriented. In such a service climate, the authority presents all necessary information for the community members to behave in accordance with the rules. It applies services to support members' cooperation (e.g., preprinted tax forms) to make cooperation easier and non-cooperation more difficult (Gangl et al., 2015 ).

Empirical research on the impact of power on climates is rare (Alm and Torgler, 2006 ; Hofmann et al., 2014 ). Derived from a study on the relationship commitment of business partners (Fu et al., 2013 ), connections between power and the service climate can be assumed. Legitimate power relates positively to a service climate (i.e., relationship commitment), whereas coercive power relates negatively to it. Based on these results, we predict that in general, coercive power stimulates an antagonistic climate, whereas legitimate power stimulates a service climate. However, the effects on climate when coercive power and legitimate power are exerted simultaneously are not clear as empirical studies are lacking.

Power and motives for cooperation

Forms of power also encourage different motives for cooperation (Kirchler et al., 2008 ; Gangl et al., 2015 ). The punishment aspect of coercive power prompts enforced compliance as threat of severe punishment. Thus, enforced compliance is defined as motive to cooperate because of the deterrent effect of monitoring and punishment (Kirchler et al., 2008 ). Enforced motivation only leads to cooperation when individuals fear monitoring and punishment and therefore think there is no alternative to comply with the rules (van Meegeren, 2001 ; Kirchler et al., 2008 ). Coercive power is effective as long as there are sufficient resources to detect breaches of rules and to undertake subsequent punishment (Becker, 1968 ; Mulder et al., 2009 ). In cases in which violations are not discovered or not avenged, coercive power is perceived as weak and, therefore, enforced motives, as well as cooperation decline.

Legitimate power, on the other hand, increases voluntary cooperation. Voluntary cooperation is defined as a motivation to cooperate with the authorities because one wants to reciprocate the positive experience gained through applied legitimate power (Kelman, 2006 ). Legitimate power activates a felt urge to reciprocate the legitimate treatment (Feld and Frey, 2007 ). Thus, individuals voluntarily accept their obligation to cooperate. Authorities support customers and clients (e.g., tax authorities offer pre-printed forms that can be submitted without the need for the taxpayer to fill in the form) so that cooperation is perceived as easy and a natural reciprocal act. Although, coercive power and legitimate power are assumed to increase cooperation, the rationale behind cooperation differs fundamentally 1 .

When coercive and legitimate power are applied together, the resulting motives to comply are unclear. Although, results indicate cooperative behavior based on coercive and legitimate power, the underlying cognitions are still unexplored (Hofmann et al., 2014 ; Hartl et al., 2015 ). First, empirical evidence indicates that people cooperate voluntarily when legitimate power is high, but only under the condition that rule-breakers can be punished (Kroll et al., 2007 ). Thus, the combination of coercive and legitimate power seems to increase voluntary cooperation and enforced compliance. In general we assume that the combination of coercive power and legitimate has the same impact as if coercive power and legitimate power were applied solely.

Overview of studies

We examine the cognitions underlying the intentions to cooperate in different social dilemma situations. In order to investigate differences in cognitions induced by extremely low or high levels of coercive and/or extremely low or high levels of legitimate power an experimental design is opted for. The experiments allow for controlling other possible influences and showing the pure influence of coercive and legitimate power.

The current studies were embedded in a broader research program testing the impact of the two forms of power—solely and combined. Hartl et al. ( 2015 ) examined the impact of beliefs of coercive and legitimate power on tax behavior and found a significant effect of both on experimental cooperative behavior. However, so far, the underlying and probably mediating cognitions of why people intent to cooperate with authority have not been analyzed. Hence, this study investigates the underlying cognitions of this behavior. As such, we analyze intended tax compliance but not behavior (partial correlation controlling for conditions between tax honesty intention and tax payments is r = 0.58, p < 0.001 in Study 1 , r = 0.60, p < 0.001 in Study 2 , and r = 0.64, p < 0.001 in Study 3 ). We examine the following three hypotheses:

• Hypothesis 1a: Coercive power leads to low levels of implicit trust, an antagonistic climate, and enforced compliance .
• Hypothesis 1b: Coercive power leads to low levels of implicit trust, an antagonistic climate, and enforced compliance, when at the same time legitimate power is wielded .
• Hypothesis 2a: Legitimate power leads to reason-based trust, a service climate, and voluntary cooperation .
• Hypothesis 2b: Legitimate power leads to reason-based trust, a service climate, and voluntary cooperation, when at the same time coercive power is wielded .
• Hypothesis 3: The relationship between coercive power and/or legitimate power and intended cooperation is mediated by implicit trust, reason-based trust, the antagonistic climate, the service climate, enforced compliance and voluntary cooperation .

To test these hypotheses, following standard procedures (cf. Kirchler et al., 2009 ) we conducted laboratory experiments and an online experiment. In the laboratory experiments, participants imagined being a taxpayer in a fictitious country (Chomland) in which tax authorities wield coercive power (Study 1 ) or legitimate power (Study 2 ) exclusively or in combination (Study 3 ). In the online experiment, coercive and legitimate power were manipulated in combination, but rather than investigating tax compliance, the decision concerned an insurance claim (Study 4 ).

To measure the level of cooperation, participants had to decide how much of their income they declare honestly to pay taxes and how much they claim at the insurance for compensation, respectively. For reasons of comparison, the designs of the four studies and the procedures are similar, facilitating conclusions on the effects of the different forms of power across various contexts. A between-subjects design of the laboratory experiments assured that participants were confronted with low or high forms of power.

Study 1: coercive power in the tax context

Participants.

In all, 120 students (64% men, M age = 24.48, SD = 5.85) majoring in several different disciplines participated on a voluntary basis and were paid according to their behavior in the experiment. As student populations are specifically naïve regarding experiences with tax authorities and our hypotheses, they specifically suit hypotheses testing in this context (Mittone, 2006 ).

Experimental design and procedure

The study was conducted by randomly assigning participants to one of two conditions. All participants were asked to imagine being self-employed taxpayers in the fictitious country Chomland with a hypothetical tax authority (for similar tax experiments see, e.g., Kirchler et al., 2009 ; Andrighetto et al., 2016 ). Specifically participants learnt “In each period a certain income is allocated to you, of which you have to pay taxes. The tax rate is 40% of your income. In each period your final income is the result of the allocated income minus the taxes paid. At the end of the experiment one period will be selected randomly. The income that you have gained in this period will be paid to you by the experimenter. Additionally, for each period there exists a tax audit probability of 15%. In case you are audited and you have evaded taxes, you have to pay back the evaded amount plus a fine of 1 time the evaded amount.” The final income was paid out by the experimenter.

In the two conditions, the tax authority held either low or high levels of coercive power. A tax authority with low/high levels of coercive power was, for example, described as “… well-known for its lenient/hard sanctions.” After participants were introduced to the experimental set-up, a taxpayer's life was simulated using the software z-Tree (Fischbacher, 2007 ). Participants were asked to answer two items about their intention to pay taxes honestly in this situation (tax honesty intention, two items; e.g., “How likely is it that you, as a citizen of Chomland, state your income and expenses totally correctly?”). After that, participants paid their taxes, whereby at the end of the experiment participants were remunerated based on their behavior [participants received on average 5.99 EUR ( SD = 1.22) or 7.66 USD ( SD = 1.56), respectively].

In all treatment conditions, participants had to fill out a questionnaire. The questionnaire assessed implicit trust (three items; e.g., “I trust the tax authority in Chomland without thinking about it.”), reason-based trust (seven items; e.g., “I trust the tax authority in Chomland because it gives me competent advice.”), the antagonistic climate (three items; e.g., “Between the tax authority in Chomland and taxpayers there exists a climate of ruthlessness.”), the service climate (three items; e.g., “Between the tax authority in Chomland and taxpayers there exists a climate that is characterized by its service-oriented nature.”), enforced compliance (three items; e.g., “When I pay taxes according to the law in Chomland, I do so because the tax authority often carries out audits.”), and voluntary cooperation (three items; e.g., “When I pay taxes according to the law in Chomland, I do so because the tax authority supports taxpayers who make unintentional mistakes.”). As a manipulation check, we asked participants' perceptions of the tax authority's coercive power (four items; e.g., “I believe that the tax authority persecutes taxpayers with audits and fines.”) and legitimate power (22 items; e.g., “I believe that the tax authority knows how to give good advice to taxpayers.”) by adapting published scales from the organizational context (Hinkin and Schriesheim, 1989 ; Raven et al., 1998 ) to the tax context (all items are listed in Supplementary Material). The scale of legitimate power compounded four sub-scales (legitimacy, expertise, information, identification), but for the sake of simplicity and due to the tested measurement models, the sub-scales were combined into one scale. Responses were indicated on a seven-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“ I totally disagree ”) to 7 (“ I totally agree ”). Cronbach's α for the eight scales were excellent and can be found in Table ​ Table1 1 .

Study 1: Results of the ANOVAs with coercive power as independent variable .

α, Cronbach α .

Socio-demographics (gender, age, income, nationality, employment, form of employment, working hours, and experience with tax authorities) were also assessed.

Preliminary data analyses

To check whether the manipulation of coercive power was successful, an ANOVA 2 was performed with the perceptions of coercive power as the dependent variable. The results showed that the manipulation was successful as low (cp low ) and high (cp high ) levels of perceptions regarding coercive power were in line with the manipulation (cp low : M = 2.60, SD = 1.34; cp high : M = 5.51, SD = 1.37; Table ​ Table1). 1 ). The manipulation of coercive power had no significant effect on the perceptions of legitimate power (Table ​ (Table1). 1 ). Participants experiencing low or high levels of coercive power reported equal perceptions of legitimate power (cp low : M = 4.13, SD = 1.04; cp high : M = 4.24, SD = 0.90; see Table ​ Table1 1 ).

Coercive power

The impact of coercive power on trust, climates, and motives.

To test Hypothesis 1a, ANOVAs were conducted, including coercive power (low vs. high) as factor variables and implicit and reason-based trust, antagonistic and service climate, and enforced compliance and voluntary cooperation as dependent variables (see Table ​ Table1 1 for ANOVA results; for a graphical representation see Figure ​ Figure1 1 in the Discussion Section). As expected, coercive power showed a tendency to decrease implicit trust (cp low : M = 2.43, SD = 1.70; cp high : M = 1.93, SD = 1.31; Table ​ Table1). 1 ). Furthermore, no matter whether participants experienced low or high levels of coercive power, they reported an equal intensity of reason-based trust (cp low : M = 3.50, SD = 1.28; cp high : M = 3.50, SD = 1.25; Table ​ Table1 1 ).

The impact of coercive and legitimate power on the trust, climate, and motive scales in Study 1 – 4 .

Regarding the perception of the relational climate, the analysis showed that, as expected, high levels of coercive power led to a higher perception of an antagonistic climate (cp high : M = 3.86, SD = 1.68) compared to when coercive power was low (cp low : M = 2.96, SD = 1.47; Table ​ Table1). 1 ). Service climate was not affected by different levels of coercive power (cp low : M = 3.34, SD = 1.61; cp high : M = 3.05, SD = 1.55; Table ​ Table1 1 ).

Regarding the motives for cooperation, as expected, participants felt more enforced to comply when coercive power was high (cp high : M = 5.27, SD = 1.80) rather than low (cp low : M = 2.73, SD = 1.86; Table ​ Table1). 1 ). Participants experiencing low or high levels of coercive power reported equal levels of voluntary cooperation (cp low : M = 3.56, SD = 1.51; cp high : M = 3.61, SD = 1.42; see Table ​ Table1 1 ).

The mediating role of implicit trust, the antagonistic climate, and enforced compliance

Investigating Hypothesis 3 regarding whether implicit trust, the perception of the antagonistic climate and enforced compliance mediate the relationship between coercive power and the intention to pay taxes honestly, we first tested, using an ANOVA, whether or not the manipulation of coercive power impacted the intention to pay taxes honestly. The manipulation of high levels of coercive power lead to higher tax honesty intention ( M = 4.92, SD = 1.70) compared to low levels of coercive power ( M = 4.10, SD = 1.78; Table ​ Table1 1 ).

In a second step, we applied the program Mediate (Hayes et al., 2011 ) to test whether the relationship between coercive power and tax honesty intention is mediated by the proposed variables (i.e., implicit trust, antagonistic climate, and enforced compliance) at the same time. With this method, we received outcomes on simple (mediators and criterion regressing on predictor) and multivariate linear regressions (criterion regressing on mediators and on predictor; Hayes et al., 2011 ; Hayes, 2013 ).

The mediator analysis revealed one indirect effect from coercive power to tax honesty intention, the relation was only found to be mediated by implicit trust (95% CI [−0.31; −0.01]; Table ​ Table2). 2 ). However, Sobel test statistics (Sobel test = −1.51, p = 0.13) do not indicate a significant mediation.

Study 1: Mediation analysis from coercive power to tax honesty intention (THI) (standard errors in parentheses) .

As predicted, coercive power generally has a negative impact on implicit trust and initiates the perception of an antagonistic climate and enforced compliance, overall confirming hypothesis 1a. Coercive power applied alone does not impact reason-based trust, the perception of a service climate or voluntary cooperation. In addition, the relationship between coercive power and intended tax honesty seems not to be mediated. Implicit trust, a perceived antagonistic climate and the enforced motive to cooperate are not mediators. Thus, Hypothesis 3 is not confirmed.

Study 2: legitimate power in the tax context

Overall, 130 students (60% men, M age = 24.40, SD = 4.86) majoring in different fields participated on a voluntary basis and were paid based on their behavior in the experiment. Again, this population was selected because of their naivety regarding experiences with tax authorities (Mittone, 2006 ).

The experimental design and procedure was similar to Study 1 . Two conditions were used, in which the tax authority was described as holding either low or high levels of legitimate power. The tax authority with low levels of legitimate power was characterized as being, for example, “poorly appreciated for its work”; the ones holding high levels of legitimate power were presented as, for example, being “highly appreciated for its work.” The scenario contains all aspects of legitimate power (legitimacy, expertise, dissemination of information, and identification). Cronbach's α for the eight scales were excellent and can be found in Table ​ Table3. 3 . The participants were remunerated according to their behavior and received, on average, 6.40 EUR ( SD = 1.38) or 8.18 USD ( SD = 1.76), respectively.

Study 2: Results of the ANOVAs with legitimate power as independent variable .

The manipulation was successful as low and high levels of legitimate power induced perceptions according to the manipulation (lp low : M = 3.16, SD = 1.05; lp high : M = 4.89, SD = 1.16; Table ​ Table2). 2 ). Surprisingly, the analysis showed that the manipulation of legitimate power had a significant impact on the perceptions of coercive power (Table ​ (Table3). 3 ). The perceptions of coercive power were higher when legitimate power was high (lp high : M = 4.51, SD = 1.57) rather than low (lp low : M = 3.48, SD = 1.64).

Legitimate power

The impact of legitimate power on trust, climates, and motives..

Testing Hypothesis 2a, ANOVAs were conducted including legitimate power (low vs. high) as factor and implicit and reason-based trust, antagonistic and service climate and enforced compliance and voluntary cooperation as dependent variables (see Table ​ Table3 3 for ANOVA results; for a graphical representation see Figure ​ Figure1 1 in the Discussion Section). Regardless of whether or not participants experienced low or high levels of legitimate power, they reported an equal intensity of implicit trust (lp low : M = 1.97, SD = 1.55; lp high : M = 2.34, SD = 1.54; see Table ​ Table3). 3 ). As expected, participants experiencing high levels of legitimate power reported high levels of reason-based trust (lp low : M = 2.55, SD = 1.09; lp high : M = 4.29, SD = 1.48; see Table ​ Table3 3 ).

Regarding the perception of the relational climate, unexpectedly the analysis revealed that low levels of legitimate power led to a higher perception of an antagonistic climate (lp low : M = 4.47, SD = 1.47) compared to when legitimate power was high (lp high : M = 2.80, SD = 1.48). In line with the hypothesis, the perception of a service climate increased with legitimate power (lp low : M = 2.57, SD = 1.50; lp high : M = 4.46, SD = 1.64; see Table ​ Table3 3 ).

Regarding the motives for cooperation, participants in the condition of high levels of legitimate power felt more enforced to comply (lp high : M = 4.70, SD = 1.68) compared to participants in the condition of low levels of legitimate power (lp low : M = 3.36, SD = 1.75). In line with predictions, participants experiencing high levels of legitimate power reported higher levels of voluntary cooperation (lp high : M = 3.90, SD = 1.61) than did participants experiencing low levels of legitimate power (lp low : M = 2.84, SD = 1.65; see Table ​ Table3 3 ).

The mediating role of reason-based trust, the service climate, and voluntary cooperation.

Testing Hypothesis 3, we first investigated for the impact of legitimate power on tax honesty intention. The ANOVA revealed that high levels of legitimate power lead to higher tax honesty intention ( M = 4.92, SD = 1.43) compared to low levels of legitimate power ( M = 3.74, SD = 1.55; Table ​ Table3 3 ).

In a second step, we used Mediate (Hayes et al., 2011 ) for the mediator analysis. The findings showed that an indirect effect from legitimate power to tax honesty intention was solely explained by reason-based trust (95% CI [0.05; 0.94]; Table ​ Table4). 4 ). Also Sobel test statistics (Sobel test = 1.81, p = 0.07; R M = 0.62 3 ) do by trend indicate this significant mediation.

Study 2: Mediation analysis from legitimate power to tax honesty intention (THI) (standard errors in parentheses) .

Consistent with Hypothesis 2a, high levels of legitimate power have a positive effect on reason-based trust, on the perception of a service climate and on voluntary cooperation. Not hypothesized, high levels of legitimate power also increase perceptions of coercive power, and higher enforced compliance. Furthermore, legitimate power profoundly reduces the perception of an antagonistic climate. Although, coercive power was assumed to be the only quality of power to have an impact on enforced compliance and the perception of an antagonistic climate, the findings point out that legitimate power is additionally interfering. Regarding Hypothesis 3, only reason-based trust is by trend mediating the relationship between legitimate power and tax honesty intention. In the third experiment, the relationship between coercive power and legitimate power is examined.

Study 3: coercive power and legitimate power combined in the tax context

Analogous to Study 1 and 2 , 368 students (34% men, M age = 24.26, SD = 5.56) majoring in different disciplines participated in the experiment and were paid based on their behavior in the experiment.

Experimental design and procedure were similar to Studies 1 and 2, but four conditions were designed in which the hypothetical tax authority held either low or high levels of coercive power and low or high levels of legitimate power. The combination of low/high levels of coercive power and low/high levels of legitimate power was operationalized through scenarios (e.g., “In general, the tax authority is known for its low/high penalties for tax evasion, and is little/very appreciated for its work.”). Cronbach's α's are excellent and are presented in Table ​ Table3. 3 . Participants were remunerated according to their behavior and received, on average, 6.21 EUR ( SD = 1.32) or 7.94 USD ( SD = 1.69), respectively.

In the following, only hypothesized and/or significant results are reported; however, for completeness, Table ​ Table5 5 displays all findings independently of whether or not they were significant.

Study 3: Results of the ANOVAs with coercive power and legitimate power as independent variables .

α, Cronbach α; CP, main effect coercive power; LP, main effect legitimate power; CPxLP, interaction effect of coercive and legitimate power .

Checking the coercive power manipulation with the participants' perceptions of coercive power, the ANOVA showed that low and high levels of coercive power conditions induced respective perceptions (cp low : M = 2.67, SD = 1.21; cp high : M = 5.50, SD = 1.33; Table ​ Table5 5 ).

Likewise, a manipulation check for legitimate power confirmed the manipulation (Table ​ (Table5). 5 ). Participants experiencing high levels of legitimate power reported perceptions of higher legitimate power (lp high : M = 4.82, SD = 0.94) than did participants who experienced low levels of legitimate power (lp low : M = 3.20, SD = 0.99). Similar to Study 2 , the analysis showed that the manipulation of legitimate power had a significant impact on the perceptions of coercive power (Table ​ (Table5). 5 ). Participants perceived coercive power to be stronger when legitimate power was high (lp high : M = 4.82, SD = 0.94) rather than low (lp low : M = 3.20, SD = 0.99).

Coercive power and legitimate power

The impact of coercive and legitimate power on trust, climates, and motives.

Testing Hypotheses 1b and 2b, 2 (low vs. high levels of coercive power) by 2 (low vs. high levels of legitimate power) ANOVAs with the depending variables implicit and reason-based trust, antagonistic and service climate and enforced compliance and voluntary cooperation were applied. Contrary to expectations, participants in conditions with low/high levels of coercive power and low/high levels of legitimate power reported equal intensity of implicit trust (main effects: cp low : M = 2.17, SD = 1.39; cp high : M = 2.00, SD = 1.33; lp low : M = 2.02, SD = 1.39; lp high M = 2.16, SD = 1.33; see Table ​ Table5; 5 ; for a graphical representation see Figure ​ Figure1 1 in the Discussion Section). Regarding reason-based trust , the analysis revealed, as expected, that participants reported higher levels of reason-based trust when legitimate power was high (lp high : M = 4.39, SD = 1.17; lp low : M = 2.69, SD = 1.04; see Table ​ Table5 5 ).

Regarding the perception of the relational climate, the analysis showed that the perception of an antagonistic climate increased with coercive power (cp low : M = 3.35, SD = 1.51; cp high : M = 4.08, SD = 1.81) and decreased with legitimate power (lp low : M = 3.38, SD = 1.58; lp high : M = 3.03, SD = 1.56; see Table ​ Table5). 5 ). Furthermore, as expected, the analysis showed that the perception of a service climate increased with legitimate power (lp low : M = 2.47, SD = 1.33; lp high : M = 4.11, SD = 1.43, see Table ​ Table5 5 ).

Regarding the motives for cooperation, the analysis highlighted that, as expected, in conditions with low levels of coercive power, participants reported feeling less enforced than in conditions with high levels of coercive power (cp low : M = 3.35, SD = 1.67; cp high : M = 5.06, SD = 1.80; see Table ​ Table5). 5 ). Furthermore, as expected, participants reported more voluntary cooperation when legitimate power was high (lp high : M = 4.04, SD = 1.55; lp low : M = 2.99, SD = 1.43, see Table ​ Table5). 5 ). No other main effects and no interaction effects were significant (see Table ​ Table5 5 ).

The mediating role of trust, climate, and motive.

Testing Hypothesis 3, the ANOVA found that coercive and legitimate power had a significant impact on intended tax honesty and that no significant interaction existed. High levels of coercive power led to higher tax honesty intention ( M = 4.98, SD = 1.41) than did low levels of coercive power ( M = 4.02, SD = 1.78). Similarly, manipulations of high levels of legitimate power stimulated higher tax honesty intention ( M = 4.86, SD = 1.50) than did lower legitimate power ( M = 4.13, SD = 1.76; Table ​ Table5 5 ).

In a second step, we again used Mediate (Hayes et al., 2011 ) for the mediator analysis, this time working with two predictors, i.e., coercive power and legitimate power. The results showed that there is only one indirect effect, that is, from legitimate power to tax honesty intention via reason-based trust (95% CI [0.10; 0.65]; Table ​ Table6). 6 ). Also Sobel test statistics (Sobel test = 2.11, p = 0.03; R M = 0.37) do indicate this significant mediation. All the other indirect effects from coercive and legitimate power are not significant.

Study 3: Mediation analysis from power to tax honesty intention (THI; standard errors in parentheses) .

The analyses partly confirm Hypotheses 1b and 2b. The manipulation of coercive power and legitimate power at the same time in the context of taxpaying confirmed that in cases of high levels of coercive power, the antagonistic climate and enforced compliance are more distinct. In addition, higher legitimate power induced reason-based trust, a distinct service climate and voluntary cooperation. Contrary to Hypothesis 1b, high levels of coercive power did not reduce implicit trust. Also, high levels of legitimate power fundamentally reduced an antagonistic climate. Regarding the mediating effect testing Hypothesis 3, only reason-based trust mediated the relationship between legitimate power and tax honesty intention. In Study 4 the impact of coercive power and legitimate power is investigated in another situation.

Study 4: coercive power and legitimate power combined in the insurance context

Overall, 102 students (83% men, M age = 22.66, SD = 3.12) majoring in industrial engineering participated in the study. For participation, all students received bonus points for one of their courses. Again, this population primarily was selected because of their naivety regarding the hypotheses and because of their inexperience with insurance organizations.

In contrast to Studies 1–3, in Study 4 scenarios in an online experiment were used in which an insurance organization was presented as wielding high or low levels of coercive power and high or low levels of legitimate power. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions. The combination of low/high levels of coercive power and of low/high levels of legitimate power was operationalized through items such as, “In general, the insurance company is known for its low/high penalties for insurance fraud. It is little/very appreciated for its work.” After the scenarios, the respondents had to report damage to the insurance organization. They had to “… imagine that [their] television set broke from the wall so that it was now in pieces. The television set had a value of 600 MU [MU, monetary units], which [they] had to report to the insurance company according to the terms. With the help of a friend, who can fake an invoice up to a maximum of 1000 MU, [they] could report a higher claim to the insurance company.” The amounts of respondents' claims (ranging from 600 to 1.000 MU) were collected to assess their relative cooperation with the insurance organization and will further be displayed in percentages [(reported amount − 600)/400]. The questionnaire that was used in Studies 1–3 was adapted to the insurance context and was applied to measure insurance fraud intention [one item; “Which damage sum would you claim at the insurance company (min. 600 MU, max. 1000 MU):”], implicit trust (three items; e.g., “I trust the insurance company Chom-Insurance without thinking about it.”), reason-based trust (seven items; e.g., “I trust the insurance company Chom-Insurance, because it gives me competent advice.”), the antagonistic climate (three items; e.g., “Between the insurance company Chom-Insurance and the insurants, there exists a climate of ruthlessness.”), the service climate (three items; e.g., “Between the insurance company Chom-Insurance and the insurants, there exists a climate, which is characterized by its service-oriented nature.”), enforced compliance (three items; e.g., “When I hand in my damage claims according to the rules of Chom-Insurance, I do so because the insurance company often carries out controls.”), and voluntary cooperation (three items; e.g., “When I hand in my damage claims according to the rules with Chom-Insurance, I do so because the insurance company supports me if I have unintentionally filled in my damage claim incorrectly.”). Analog to the tax context, the participants' perceptions regarding wielded coercive power (four items; e.g., “I believe that the insurance company Chom-Insurance persecutes insurance fraudsters with audits and fines.”) and legitimate power (22 items; e.g., “I believe that the insurance company Chom-Insurance knows how to give good advice to insurants.”) of the insurance organization were adapted for insurance and assessed as manipulation check. Responses were indicated on a seven-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“ I totally disagree ”) to 7 (“ I totally agree ”). Cronbach's α's are excellent and presented in Table ​ Table7. 7 . Socio-demographics (gender, age, income, nationality, employment, and experience with insurance organizations) were also assessed.

Study 4: Results of the ANOVAs with coercive power and legitimate power as independent variables .

In the following, only hypothesized and/or significant results are reported; for completeness, Table ​ Table7 7 displays all findings independently, whether significant or not.

The manipulation check showed that perceptions on coercive power and legitimate power were induced in line with the manipulation (Table ​ (Table7). 7 ). Participants held perceptions of lower coercive power in the low levels of coercive power condition (cp low : M = 3.17, SD = 1.32) than in the high levels of coercive power condition (cp high : M = 5.28, SD = 1.31). A weak interaction of coercive and legitimate power on the perceptions of coercive power existed, but as this interaction explains only 6% of the variance and the main effect of coercive power explains 42%, this interaction is negligible. Participants experiencing high levels of legitimate power held perceptions of higher legitimate power (lp high : M = 4.74, SD = 1.14) than the participants experiencing low legitimate power (lp low : M = 3.79, SD = 1.15; Table ​ Table7 7 ).

Testing Hypotheses 1b and 2b, 2 (low vs. high levels of coercive power) by 2 (low vs. high levels of legitimate power) ANOVAs with the dependent variables implicit and reason-based trust, antagonistic and service climate and enforced compliance and voluntary cooperation were conducted. Similar to the experiments in the tax context, participants in conditions with low/high levels of coercive power and low/high levels of legitimate power reported equal intensity of implicit trust (main effects: cp low : M = 2.02, SD = 1.62; cp high : M = 2.35, SD = 1.55; lp low : M = 2.00, SD = 1.43; lp high M = 2.40, SD = 1.70, see Table ​ Table7; 7 ; for a graphical representation see Figure ​ Figure1 1 in the Discussion Section). As expected, participants reported high levels of reason-based trust when legitimate power was high (lp high : M = 4.46, SD = 1.14; lp low : M = 3.22, SD = 1.37, see Table ​ Table7 7 ).

The analysis showed that, as expected, the perception of an antagonistic climate increased with coercive power (cp low : M = 2.84, SD = 1.71; cp high : M = 3.84, SD = 1.85) and decreased with legitimate power (lp low : M = 3.84, SD = 1.81; lp high : M = 2.99, SD = 1.81, see Table ​ Table7). 7 ). Furthermore, as expected, the perception of a service climate increased only with legitimate power (lp low : M = 3.05, SD = 1.62; lp high : M = 4.58, SD = 1.33, see Table ​ Table7 7 ).

Regarding motives for cooperation, the analysis showed that, as expected, participants in conditions with low levels of coercive power reported feeling less enforced (cp low : M = 3.69, SD = 1.81) compared to conditions with high levels of coercive power (cp high : M = 4.37, SD = 1.66; see Table ​ Table7). 7 ). As expected, participants reported more voluntary cooperation when legitimate power was high (lp high : M = 4.35, SD = 1.49; lp low : M = 3.37, SD = 1.44, see Table ​ Table7). 7 ). No other main effects or interaction effects were significant (see Table ​ Table7 7 ).

The mediating role of trust, climate, and motive

Testing Hypothesis 3, an ANOVA revealed no significant main effect of coercive power, no impact of legitimate power and no significant interaction (Table ​ (Table7 7 ).

In a second step, we applied again the program Mediate (Hayes et al., 2011 ) for the mediator analysis. The results revealed that there are three indirect effects from power to insurance fraud. First, legitimate power impacts insurance fraud intention via reason-based trust (95% CI [−20.80; −0.44], Table ​ Table8). 8 ). Second, coercive power impacts insurance fraud intention via enforced compliance (95% CI [0.77; 10.64]) and third, legitimate power also impacts insurance fraud intention via enforced compliance (95% CI [0.28; 9.38]). However, Sobel test statistics revealed only a trend for a mediation from coercive power to enforced compliance to insurance fraud (CP→EC→IFI: Sobel test = −1.72, p =.08; R M = −0.26). All other mediation were not significant (LP→RBT→IFI: Sobel test = −1.60, p = 0.11; LP→EC→IFI: Sobel test = 1.52, p = 0.13). The other indirect effects from coercive and legitimate power are not significant.

Study 4: Mediation analysis from power to insurance fraud intention (IFI; standard errors in parentheses) .

The predictions of Hypotheses 1b and 2b are partly confirmed. The combination of coercive and legitimate power backs up the prediction that coercive power impacts the antagonistic climate and enforced compliance (Hypothesis 1b). Furthermore, legitimate power had a positive impact on reason-based trust, the perception of a service climate and voluntary cooperation (Hypothesis 2b). In line with Study 3 but contrary to predictions, legitimate power reduced the antagonistic climate. In contrast to Studies 1–3, results of the mediator analysis showed that coercive power increases enforced compliance, which in turn decreases the intention to commit insurance fraud.

General discussion

Overall, all four studies confirm the hypothesized impact of coercive and legitimate on cognitions when deciding to cooperate with authorities (Figure ​ (Figure1). 1 ). As expected, when coercive power was applied exclusively, it decreased implicit trust, increased the perception of an antagonistic climate, and enforced compliance. For the combined prevalence of coercive and legitimate power, coercive power does not impact implicit trust, but leads to a perceived antagonistic climate and to an enforced motive to comply. The missing impact of coercive power on implicit trust, when combined with legitimate power, might stem from the fact that legitimate power stimulates rational considerations because of reason-based trust, and rational considerations are aspect of system 2, so that implicit trust (system 1) cannot arise (cf. Sittenthaler et al., 2015 ). Coercive power has a direct impact on tax cooperation intention and an indirect effect mediated via enforced compliance on insurance fraud intention.

As expected, legitimate power (wielded exclusively or in combination with coercive power) increases reason-based trust, the perception of a service climate and the motive to cooperate voluntarily. The relationship of legitimate power and intended cooperative behavior is mediated by reason-based trust.

Two unexpected results were found. First, in Study 2 , and by tendency in Studies 3 and 4, legitimate power, contrary to expectations, increased the enforced motive to cooperate. One explanation is that due to feelings of reciprocity, even the wielding of legitimate power might make participants experience some “social” coercion that is responsible for motives of enforced compliance. This is in line with Ouchi's ( 1979 ) informal clan control, which sees reciprocity and a legitimate organization as the foundation. Additionally, social agreement, such as common values and beliefs, would constitute a further pre-requisite for clan control. Another possible reason is that legitimate power leads to the impression that authorities have a high proficiency for detecting and punishing defecting individuals, which results in feelings of enforced compliance. This result shows that a relations between legitimate power and enforced compliance needs to be included in the Slippery Slope Framework (Gangl et al., 2015 ) so that future research will consider this issue.

Second, contrary to expectations but in line with earlier findings (Hofmann et al., 2014 ), legitimate power, even when combined with coercive power, reduced the perceived antagonistic climate (Studies 2–4). When combined, the exertion of audits and fines (i.e., coercive power) can be believed to be legitimate and, thus, be accepted as the right thing to do. This assumption was supported by Study 2 , which showed that coercive power is more pronounced when legitimate power is rather high (in this study, only legitimate power was manipulated and no information on coercive power was given). Then, trust in authorities and relational climates were more effected by legitimate power than by coercive power alone. This is suggested by the relatively strong impact of legitimate power on reason-based trust in Study 2 – 4 . Overall, the present results certainly indicate a connection between coercive power and legitimate power. With the current experiments, this connection, e.g., how the application of legitimate power impacts the perception of coercive power, cannot sufficiently be tested, but the Slippery Slope Framework (Gangl et al., 2015 ) needs to be modified including a connection between coercive power and legitimate power and future research will have to investigate this aspect.

The current studies have some limitations that have to be addressed in future research. The research theoretically bases on the slippery slope framework postulating that authorities' different forms of power influence cognitions and subsequently cooperative behavior. It can be argued that this causal relationship could be the other way round that not power impacts cognitions but actual cognitions are responsible for the perceptions of power. This certainly can be the case and needs further empirical evidence, nevertheless, as our studies show, there certainly is a significant impact of power on cognitions. As with most laboratory experiments, the investigated samples are not representative, they are specifically comprised of students who are not well-experienced with tax authorities and/or insurance organizations. This, nonetheless, is actually an advantage. For naïve participants, it is easier to imagine the fictitious scenario and act based on the presented scenarios and not on prior experiences with the authority (Mittone, 2006 ). That said, laboratory experiments still create a highly artificial situation in which individuals might not behave as in an everyday context. Therefore, allowing participants to take part in an online experiment at home (Study 4 ) is a possibility to counteract this artificiality without changing manipulation. Nevertheless, future field experiments that not only investigate the direct impact of power on cooperation (e.g., Ariel, 2012 ; Gangl et al., 2014 ) but also investigate the underlying processes could strengthen the current results; tax authorities and/or insurance organizations displaying coercive and/or legitimate power would show the effects of power in vivo . Furthermore, the experimental design of the current study can only test for differences. The correlative connections between power and processes are only assumed. Thus, this design only allows for limited conclusions regarding the mediators since they are based on manipulated factors of fictitious authorities and not on actual existing authorities. However, due to the experimental setting, we were able to obtain high internal validity. Future research needs to increase external validity and address the studied relationships by using field data.

Literature indicates that the severity of punishment is contingent on the type of social dilemma situation (Molenmaker et al., 2014 ). It has to be mentioned that legal circumstances of tax authorities and insurance organizations are different. While in comparison to tax authorities, insurance organizations do not have the legal right to punish insurance fraud. Taxpayers, compared to insurance holders, also do not have the option to turn to another tax authority if they are not satisfied with a specific tax authority's conduct. Taxpayers are at the mercy of one specific tax authority in a certain country. Nevertheless, results on the impact of power work similarly in both contexts. The two authorities in the studies, the tax authority and the insurance organization, represent a small range of authorities that wield power to control individuals' behavior in different situations. In future research, other institutions, such as governments ensuring citizens' environmental friendliness, should be investigated. Research on how their power affects trust, relational climates, and motives for cooperation will further support, as well as extend, current findings.

From a practical point of view, the present findings are of value, not only for tax authorities and insurance companies, but for all authorities wielding power. Results show that sanctions of undesired behavior, as well as legitimate procedures, both not only foster cooperation, but also have different impacts on underlying cognitions. Severe punishments lead to a hostile and antagonistic climate that should be avoided, whereas supportive procedures foster trust toward the authority and the perception of a reciprocative service climate. Legitimate power operates via establishing reason-based trust. Tax authorities and insurance organizations are supposed to reduce costly punishments, provide supportive procedures and helpful information, and pursue societal goals to assure a service climate. This would, in the long run, create trust toward them which fosters cooperative behavior. The findings also indicate that strict audits and severe fines might alienate individuals that are either reacting with enforced compliance or looking for more appealing alternatives. Thus, the current results should initiate rethinking power of all authorities shaping individual behavior.

Highlighting the mechanisms by experimentally showing how coercive and/or legitimate power of authorities affect trust in authorities, the relational climate, and their motives over different contexts expanded the understanding of the operating mode of authorities' power. While the mediating effects clearly show that a key factor in understanding the mechanisms is reason-based trust, implicit trust, the relational climates and motives to comply become of marginal interest. They are mainly a product of specific forms of power, but they do not interfere with the actual connection of power and behavioral intention. These findings have extensive consequences for theory, as well as for real world authorities, giving direction for future research and specifying actions for power wielding authorities. In a nutshell, trust building measures are central, as reason-based trust is mediating the impact of power on cooperation, but other cognitions (interaction climates, motives) might not have that importance for cooperation.

Ethics statement

The present study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (7th revision, 2013) and local ethical guidelines for experimentation with human participants at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Vienna. All participants gave written informed consent prior to the experiment.

Author contributions

EH: Research design, conduction of Studies 1–4, analyses of Studies 1–4, drafting of article. BH: Conduction of Study 4 , analyses of Studies 1–4, drafting of article. KG: Research design, analyses of Studies 1–4, drafting of article. MH: Conduction of Studies 1–4, drafting of article. EK: Drafting of article.

This research was financed by grant number P24863-G16 from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) ( http://www.fwf.ac.at/en/ ).

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We thank Sabrina Buhl, Bea Harbich and Darina Mescic for their support with data collection.

1 Although, enforced compliance and voluntary cooperation seem similar to the concept of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation (Ryan and Deci, 2000 ), this is not the case. While enforced compliance is comparable to extrinsic motivation based on external regulation, voluntary cooperation can neither be classified as other forms of extrinsic (based on introjection, identification, integration) or intrinsic information, because it is actually a reciprocal act.

2 All ANOVAs (studies 1–4) were also undertaken as ANCOVAs with socio-demographic control variables, resulting in the same results as the reported ANOVA results.

3 We us R M , the ration of the indirect effect to the direct effect, as an effect size for the mediation (Preacher and Kelley, 2011 ).

Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00005/full#supplementary-material

• Alm J., Torgler B. (2006). Culture differences and tax morale in the United States and in Europe . J. Econ. Psychol. 27 , 224–246. 10.1016/j.joep.2005.09.002 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Andreoni J., Erard B., Feinstein J. (1998). Tax compliance . J. Econ. Lit. 36 , 818–860. [ Google Scholar ]
• Andrighetto G., Zhang N., Ottone S., Ponzano F., D'Attoma J., Steinmo S. (2016). Are some countries more honest than others? Evidence from a tax compliance experiment in Sweden and Italy . Front. Psychol. 7 :472. 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00472 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Andringa T. C., van den Bosch K. A., Vlaskamp C. (2013). Learning autonomy in two or three steps: linking open-ended development, authority, and agency to motivation . Front. Psychol. 4 :766. 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00766 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ariel B. (2012). Deterrence and moral persuasion effects on corporate tax compliance: findings from a randomized controlled trial . Criminology 50 , 27–69. 10.1111/j.1745-9125.2011.00256.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bachmann R. (2001). Trust, power and control in trans-organizational relations . Organ. Stud. 22 , 337–365. 10.1177/0170840601222007 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Balliet D., Van Lange P. A. M. (2013). Trust, punishment, and cooperation across 18 societies: a meta-analysis . Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 8 , 363–379. 10.1177/1745691613488533 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Becker G. S. (1968). Crime and punishment: an economic approach . J. Polit. Econ. 76 , 169–217. 10.1086/259394 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bijlsma-Frankema K., Costa A. C. (2005). Understanding the trust–control nexus . Int. Sociol. 20 , 259–282. 10.1177/0268580905055477 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bijlsma-Frankema K., Van de Bunt G. (2002). In Search of Parsimony: A Multiple Triangulation Approach to Antecedents of Trust in Managers . Available online at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.133.3741&rep1&type=pdf (Retrieved October 25, 2011).
• Braithwaite V. A. (2009). Defiance in Taxation and Governance: Resisting and Dismissing Authority in a Democracy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. [ Google Scholar ]
• Castelfranchi C., Falcone R. (2010). Trust Theory: A Socio-Cognitive and Computational Model. West Sussex: Wiley. [ Google Scholar ]
• Chenhall R. H., Hall M., Smith D. (2010). Social capital and management control system: a study of a non-government organization . Account. Organ. Soc. 35 , 727–756. 10.1016/j.aos.2010.09.006 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Copeland P. V., Cuccia A. D. (2002). Multiple determinants of framing referents in tax reporting and compliance . Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 88 , 499–526. 10.1006/obhd.2001.2989 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Das T. K., Teng B.-S. (2001). Trust, control, and risk in strategic alliances: an integrated framework . Organ. Stud. 22 , 251–283. 10.1177/0170840601222004 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ehrhart M. G., Schneider B., MacEy W. H. (2013). Organizational Climate and Culture: An Introduction to Theory, Research, and Practice . New York, NY: Routledge. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fehr E., Falk A. (2002). Psychological foundations of incentives . Eur. Econ. Rev. 46 , 687–724. 10.1016/S0014-2921(01)00208-2 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Feld L. P., Frey B. S. (2007). Tax compliance as the result of a psychological tax contract: the role of incentives and responsive regulation . Law Policy 29 , 102–120. 10.1111/j.1467-9930.2007.00248.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fischbacher U. (2007). z-Tree: Zurich toolbox for ready-made economic experiments . Exp. Econ. 10 , 171–178. 10.1007/s10683-006-9159-4 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Freiberg A. (2010). The Tools of Regulation . Sydney, NSW: The Federation Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• French J. R., Raven B. (1959). The bases of social power , in Studies in Social Power, ed Cartwright D. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan; ), 150–167. [ Google Scholar ]
• Fu S., Lin J., Sun L. (2013). An empirical examination of the stability of the alliance of “a company+farmers”: from the perspective of farmers . Chin. Manag. Stud. 7 , 382–402. 10.1108/CMS-09-2012-0134 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gangl K., Hofmann E., Kirchler E. (2015). Tax authorities' interaction with taxpayers: a conception of compliance in social dilemmas by power and trust . New Ideas Psychol. 37 , 13–23. 10.1016/j.newideapsych.2014.12.001 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gangl K., Muehlbacher S., de Groot M., Goslinga S., Hofmann E., Kogler C., et al. (2013). “How can I help you?” Perceived service orientation of tax authorities and tax compliance . FinanzArchiv 69 , 487–510. 10.1628/001522113X675683 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gangl K., Torgler B., Kirchler E., Hofmann E. (2014). Effects of supervision on tax compliance: evidence from a field experiment in Austria . Econ. Lett. 123 , 378–382. 10.1016/j.econlet.2014.03.027 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hartl B., Hofmann E., Gangl K., Hartner-Tiefenthaler M., Kirchler E. (2015). Does the sole description of a tax authority affect tax evasion? – The impact of described coercive and legitimate power . PLoS ONE 10 :e0123355. 10.1371/journal.pone.0123355 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hartner-Tiefenthaler M., Kubicek B., Kirchler E., Rechberger S., Wenzel M. (2012). Perceived distributive fairness of European transfer payments and EU-taxes in Austria, the Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom . Appl. Psychol. 61 , 454–478. 10.1111/j.1464-0597.2011.00478.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hayes A. F. (2013). Introduction to Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process Analysis: A Regression-Based Approach. New York, NY: Guilford Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Hayes A. F., Preacher K. J., Myers T. A. (2011). Mediation and the estimation of indirect effects in political communication research , in Sourcebook for Political Communication Research: Methods, Measures, and Analytical Techniques , eds Bucy E. P., Holbert R. L. (New York, NY: Routledge; ), 434–465. [ Google Scholar ]
• Hinkin T. R., Schriesheim C. A. (1989). Development and application of new scales to measure the French and Raven (1959) bases of social power . J. Appl. Psychol. 74 , 561–567. 10.1037/0021-9010.74.4.561 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hofmann E., Gangl K., Kirchler E., Stark J. (2014). Enhancing tax compliance through coercive and legitimate power of tax authorities by concurrently diminishing or facilitating trust in tax authorities . Law Policy 36 , 290–313. 10.1111/lapo.12021 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kelman C. H. (2006). Interests, relationships, identities: three central issues for individuals and groups in negotiating their social environment . Annu. Rev. Psychol. 57 , 1–26. 10.1146/annurev.psych.57.102904.190156 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kirchler E., Hoelzl E., Wahl I. (2008). Enforced versus voluntary tax compliance: the “slippery slope” framework . J. Econ. Psychol. 29 , 210–225. 10.1016/j.joep.2007.05.004 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kirchler E., Muehlbacher S., Hoelzl E., Webley P. (2009). Effort and aspirations in tax evasion: experimental evidence . Appl. Psychol. 58 , 488–507. 10.1111/j.1464-0597.2009.00403.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kramer R. M. (1999). Trust and distrust in organizations: emerging perspectives, enduring questions . Annu. Rev. Psychol. 50 , 569–598. 10.1146/annurev.psych.50.1.569 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kroll S., Cherry T. L., Shogren J. F. (2007). Voting, punishment, and public goods . Econ. Inq. 45 , 557–570. 10.1111/j.1465-7295.2007.00028.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Malhotra D., Murnighan J. K. (2002). The effects of contracts on interpersonal trust . Adm. Sci. Q. 47 , 534–559. 10.2307/3094850 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Martin K. D., Cullen J. B. (2006). Continuities and extensions of ethical climate theory: a meta-analytic review . J. Bus. Ethics 69 , 175–194. 10.1007/s10551-006-9084-7 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Marwell G., Ames R. E. (1979). Experiments on the provision of public goods. I. Resources, interest, group size, and the free-rider problem . Am. J. Sociol. 84 , 1335–1360. 10.1086/226937 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Masclet D., Noussair C., Tucker S., Villeval M.-C. (2003). Monetary and nonmonetary punishment in the voluntary contributions mechanism . Am. Econ. Rev. 93 , 366–380. 10.1257/000282803321455359 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mayer R. C., Davis J. H., Schoorman F. D. (1995). An integrative model of organizational trust . Acad. Manag. 20 , 709–734. [ Google Scholar ]
• Mittone L. (2006). Dynamic behaviour in tax evasion: an experimental approach . J. Soc. Econ. 35 , 813–835. 10.1016/j.socec.2005.11.065 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Molenmaker W. E., de Kwaadsteniet E. W., van Dijk E. (2014). On the willingness to costly reward cooperation and punish non-cooperation: the moderating role of type of social dilemma . Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 125 , 175–183. 10.1016/j.obhdp.2014.09.005 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mulder L. B., van Dijk E., De Cremer D., Wilke H. A. M. (2006). Undermining trust and cooperation: the paradox of sanctioning systems in social dilemmas . J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 42 , 147–162. 10.1016/j.jesp.2005.03.002 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mulder L. B., Verboon P., de Cremer D. (2009). Sanctions and moral judgments: the moderating effect of sanction severity and trust in authorities . Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 39 , 255–269. 10.1002/ejsp.506 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ouchi W. (1979). A conceptual framework for the design of organizational control mechanisms . Manage. Sci. 25 , 833–848. 10.1287/mnsc.25.9.833 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Preacher K. J., Kelley K. (2011). Effect size measures for mediation models: quantitative strategies for communicating indirect effects . Psychol. Methods 16 , 93–115. 10.1037/a0022658 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Raven B. H. (1992). A power/interaction model of interpersonal influence . J. Soc. Behav. Pers. 7 , 217–244. [ Google Scholar ]
• Raven B. H. (1993). The bases of power: origins and recent developments . J. Soc. Issues 49 , 227–251. 10.1111/j.1540-4560.1993.tb01191.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Raven B. H., Schwarzwald J., Koslowsky M. (1998). Conceptualizing and measuring a power/interaction model of interpersonal influence . J. Appl. Soc. Psychol. 28 , 307–332. 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1998.tb01708.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ryan R. M., Deci E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: classic definitions and new directions . Contemp. Educ. Psychol. 25 , 54–67. 10.1006/ceps.1999.1020 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sittenthaler S., Steindl C., Jonas E. (2015). Legitimate vs. illegitimate restrictions–a motivational and physiological approach investigating reactance processes . Front. Psychol. 6 :632. 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00632 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Turner J. C. (2005). Explaining the nature of power: a three-process theory . Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 35 , 1–22. 10.1002/ejsp.244 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Tyler T. R. (2006). Psychological perspectives on legitimacy and legitimation . Annu. Rev. Psychol. 57 , 375–400. 10.1146/annurev.psych.57.102904.190038 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Tyler T. R., Schulhofer S., Huq A. Z. (2010). Legitimacy and deterrence effects in counterterrorism policing: a study of Muslim Americans . Law Soc. Rev. 44 , 365–402. 10.1111/j.1540-5893.2010.00405.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Van Lange P. A. M., Joireman J., Parks C. D., Van Dijk E. (2013). The psychology of social dilemmas: a review . Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 120 , 125–141. 10.1016/j.obhdp.2012.11.003 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• van Meegeren P. (2001). Blue bags or refuse tourism: social acceptance of closed policymaking . Soc. Nat. Resour. 14 , 77–86. 10.1080/089419201300199572 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Victor B., Cullen J. B. (1988). The organizational bases of ethical work climates . Adm. Sci. Q. 33 , 101–125. 10.2307/2392857 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Weibel A. (2007). Formal control and trustworthiness. Shall the twain never meet? Group Organ. Manag. 32 , 500–517. 10.1177/1059601106293961 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]

• Published October 4, 2019
• 7 Minute Read

The Role of Power in Leadership

The concepts of power and leadership are interconnected. While an individual may exert power without being a leader, an individual can’t be a leader without having power.

Power and Leadership Trends

We conducted a research study to better understand how leaders use power and how individuals and organizations can improve their leadership through the effective use of power. We surveyed participants who attended our senior executive leadership development programs , and the data we found indicated some tensions around leadership and the distribution of power.

In fact, nearly 60% of survey respondents reported they believe that their organizations work to empower their people at all levels, and 53% of those surveyed agreed that their organization rewards leaders for empowering people.

More than half stated that power is concentrated among a few select individuals in their organization; 28% of survey participants agreed that power is misused by top leaders within their organizations; and only 29% believed that their organizations teach their leaders how to effectively leverage their full power.

These organizational trends relative to power and leadership suggest that while power isn’t typically misused by top leaders, it does tend to be concentrated on a select few individuals. However, flatter organizational structures and self-directed work teams are becoming more commonplace, which may increase the level of empowerment that employees experience in future years.

Organizations also reward leaders who empower the people they lead, thereby encouraging overall employee empowerment; however, fewer organizations fully leverage opportunities to teach leaders how to effectively use their power for the greater good of the organization. This leaves the definition of appropriate and effective use of power largely up to individual leaders.

Sources of Leadership Power

When most people think about power, they immediately think about the control that high-level leaders exert from their positions atop the organizational hierarchy. But power extends far beyond the formal authority that comes from a title (or from having a corner office with a view). Leaders at all levels have access to power, but that power often goes unrecognized or underutilized.

Previous research has identified 7 bases of power that leaders may leverage:

• The power of position  is the formal authority that derives from a person’s title or position in a group or an organization.
• The power of charisma  is the influence that’s generated by a leader’s style or persona.
• The power of relationships  is the influence that leaders gain through their formal and informal networks both inside and outside of their organizations.
• The power of information  is the control that’s generated through the use of evidence deployed to make an argument.
• The power of expertise  is the influence that comes from developing and communicating specialized knowledge (or the perception of knowledge).
• The power of punishment  is the ability to sanction individuals for failure to conform to standards or expectations.
• The power to reward others  is the ability to recognize or reward individuals for adhering to standards or expectations.

How to Leverage Power and Leadership Effectively

All in all, our research findings suggest that leaders can be more effective when they emphasize the power of relationships and the power of information, and also develop their other available bases of power.

10 Simple Strategies for Leveraging Power

Here are some strategies for leveraging power in leadership effectively:

1. Make relationships a priority.

Your ability to use the power of relationships will be compromised if you’re not connecting with the right people. Therefore, identify the people with whom you need to establish or develop a relationship, and invest time and energy into your existing relationships. Seek to understand others better and acknowledge others’ needs to build the social capital required to influence others now and in the future.

Repair damaged relationships and the image others may have of you. Look for ways to reestablish trust with others through face-to-face interaction and the sharing of honest feedback. Be aware of how others perceive you, and look for  ways to influence  their perceptions by soliciting feedback from trusted others.

2. Don’t overplay your personal agenda.

While the power of relationships can be an effective method for promoting your own agenda, it also risks others perceiving you as self-serving rather than a “team player.” It’s important for leaders to be aware of these negative perceptions to effectively leverage the power of relationships. Ensure that advancing your own agenda is not perceived as a misuse of power.

3. Maximize your communication network.

Think about the people you communicate with the most. Are they providing you with access to unique information or redundant information?  Expand your network  to find people who may be untapped sources of information.

4. Be generous with information.

If you are a central node or conduit of information, remember that keeping information to yourself can have negative consequences. Share information broadly and with integrity. You don’t want to be perceived as hoarding information for your personal gain. Of course, you don’t want to make the opposite mistake and reveal confidential or personal information.

5. Make the most of your position.

Research and experience suggest that authority doesn’t automatically accompany a formal leadership role. We can all think of peers who, despite their similarities in tenure and level, may have more or less power than we do. In other words, position doesn’t always mean power. You may want to find some subtle ways to communicate your formal authority, such as including your title in your email signature, communicating in meetings where you normally keep quiet, or modifying your style of dress so that you resemble people at the level above you. This is also a good example of  effective self-promotion  at work.

6. Develop your brand of charisma.

How would you feel if you were in an audience where your normally low-key CEO “borrowed” the style of an energetic, larger-than-life motivational speaker? At best you might be amused; at worst, you would see the CEO as a pathetic impression of the real thing.

Regardless of your level of charisma, the key is to make small changes in  your leadership image  while maintaining your authenticity. Maintain the characteristics that make you who you are, but try to identify 2 or 3 behaviors that might increase your ability to connect with others (such as making more eye contact, smiling more often). Practice those new behaviors, enlisting help from a coach or mentor if needed.

7. Be the expert.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about power is that it’s generally in the eyes of the beholder. You can’t just have power de facto unless there are people willing to perceive you as having power. The same holds true for expert power – it comes from actual expertise (such as an advanced degree or relevant experience) or the perception of expertise. Don’t be shy about putting your credentials on your business cards, in your email signature, on social media, or talking about your experience and expertise.

8. Tailor your power to reward others.

Many leaders mistakenly assume that leveraging reward power only means giving people more money. While this option sounds attractive, it’s not always possible. Consider recognizing and incentivizing your team members in other ways.

Ask your team members what they would find rewarding. Some team members may find a group picnic or outing highly rewarding; others may find this tedious or tiring. Time off or flexible hours might work for some employees; others may not even take notice. Whatever their incentive, don’t make the mistake of assuming that one reward fits all.

9. Reward with words.

Give positive feedback often. Our experience with leaders across industries tells us that during the course of a typical working relationship, it takes a ratio of 4:1 (4 positives for every negative) for a receiver of feedback to believe that the feedback has been fair. This does not mean that you have to give a team member 4 positive pieces of feedback every time you have a negative message to deliver. It  does  suggest that many of us have a long way to go in terms of acknowledging what our people are doing right.

At the same time, when team members fail to live up to expectations, communicate and enforce your standards, but be sure to provide support along the way. We recommend  using SBI to provide feedback in a talent conversation . Also, be explicit about consequences for behavior or results that don’t meet expectations – and follow through consistently.

10. Teach others.

Leveraging your full power doesn’t mean hoarding it. If you want to empower the people you lead, you also need to teach them how to use the power they have available to them. Think about the people you lead. What are those at the top of the list doing effectively? What could those at the bottom of the list be doing better? Use the 7 bases of power as a way to evaluate, communicate, and teach about leadership power in your organization.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Prepare yourself for C-suite challenges and understand the role of power and leadership with our executive leadership programs .

This article was written by our Leading Effectively staff, who analyze our decades of pioneering, expert research and experiences in the field to share content that will help leaders at every level. Subscribe to our emails to get the latest research-based leadership articles and insights sent straight to your inbox.

Table of Contents

Don’t miss a single insight! Get our latest cutting-edge, research-based leadership content sent directly to your inbox.

Related Topics

What to explore next.

If your goal is reaching the C-suite or becoming a CEO, find out first if you have the 4 key readiness components that it takes to prepare for the role and be successful.

Leading at the top presents unique challenges. The senior leadership skills that top executives need to succeed help them to tackle both short- and long-term needs.

Our research shows that 4 core leadership skills can help fundraising leaders create more impact and fundraising success.

The ability to influence others is the fundamental skill that leaders must master in order to be effective. Here are the 4 core influencing skills.

Understand the 3 outcomes of influencing, the 3 types of tactics that can be used to influence others, and the 6 essential skills for effective influencing.

Related Solutions

Do you know how to have greater influence as a leader? Upskill your team's influencing skills so they can drive priorities forward more effectively.

Leading from the top is challenging. Explore our transformative executive leadership programs to prepare your most senior leaders.

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)® is a top-ranked, global, nonprofit provider of leadership development and a pioneer in the field of global leadership research. We know from experience how transformative remarkable leaders really can be.

Over the past 50 years, we’ve worked with organizations of all sizes from around the world, including more than 2/3 of the Fortune 1000. Our hands-on development solutions are evidence-based and steeped in our work with hundreds of thousands of leaders at all levels.

The 10 Sources of Power and How Anyone Can Use Them

Power is for everyone, not just high-ranking members of society..

Posted March 23, 2021 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

In my last blog post , I explained the difference between power and influence as they’re classically defined in business and organizational psychology, and I made the case that even though the words “power and influence” have some ambivalent connotations, these forces can be used in positive ways. I also reviewed Robert Cialdini’s seven principles of influence and, in what I hoped was a moving example of using these principles for good, I shared a letter that a former student of mine had written to his sick mother as a way to convince her to undergo treatment that she needed.

This time we’ll be looking at the principles of power, which are a lot more complex than many people realize. And though it might seem counterintuitive at first, we’ll see how power is not just something that belongs to, and is used by, those who fit the conventional image of powerful people—business executives, high-ranking politicians, and military officers, to name a few examples. It is also something that can be wielded, very effectively in fact, by ordinary people who occupy rank and file positions in organizations.

The 10 Sources of Power

In a classic 1959 study, two social psychologists named John French and Bertram Raven originally identified five different sources of power: legitimate, reward, coercive, expert, and referent. Six years later Raven added a sixth, informational. Over the years, based on research done by others, I’ve been able to identify four additional sources of power that I add to French and Raven’s original six when I teach my classes on power and influence in organizational politics . I came up with a mnemonic device to help my students remember them:

L o RCER, INC .’s F ramed A genda

The “LoRCER, INC.” part (minus the lowercase “o”) is an acronym, and the words “Framed” and “Agenda” represent the sources of power they refer to, framing power and agenda power. Let’s take a closer look at what each source of power means.

• Legitimate power: This is the one that’s most obvious. It’s power granted by the rank, status, and title that an individual or group has within an organization or society. Having legitimate power usually makes reward power and coercive power (see below) possible, though it isn’t the only way as I’ll explain shortly.
• Reward power: The ability to grant various kinds of benefits to others such as hire, promote, and give raises. It’s typically made possible by legitimate power, but the difference is in how they work. With legitimate power, the status and title alone demand that people comply. With reward power, people want to comply more out of a desire for the benefits and rewards implicitly promised for complying (e.g., promotions and raises).
• Coercive power: Basically the opposite of reward power. It’s the ability to punish in some way such as reprimands, suspensions, demotions, and ultimately termination. As with reward power, it usually comes together with legitimate power, and people will comply out of fear of being punished.
• Expert power: Power that comes from having specialized knowledge in a valued area. People will comply out of belief in the power holder’s expertise as well as the desire to benefit from that expertise and/or the fear of missing out on something if they don’t. For example, when the COVID-19 pandemic caused the sudden transition to online learning, one person who suddenly became more important than just about everyone else here at the University of San Diego School of Business was a fellow named Brett Beyers. Mr. Beyers, you see, is the official tech guru of our department.
• Referent power: This is power that comes from charisma , likeability, and attractiveness (not necessarily physical), regardless of rank and status. People comply with this kind of power due to the admiration they have for the holder of referent power.
• Informational power: Somewhat similar to expert power but also different. Expert power is about specialized knowledge in a specific area. Informational power is broad and generalized knowledge about an organization, its culture, and its history. A person with informational power knows “how things really work” in an organization.
• Network power: Power based on the breadth and depth of connections a person has in their professional and/or personal network. There’s the old saying that goes, “It’s all about who you know.” When it comes to network power, at least, it’s true.
• Centrality power: Centrality is all about “being in the lo/op.” Lo/op is another mnemonic device to remember the words location and operational.

Location power is being physically visible. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a guru of organizational power, once told the story that his former office at UC Berkeley was one of the most powerful locations on campus because it was located across from the men’s room. Throughout the day virtually every business faculty member—this was back when most of the business faculty were men—would pass by, naturally leading to networking opportunities.

Operational power is when an individual serves as a funnel or hub for numerous important processes. Even if such individuals are not high-ranking, they are crucial to the running of an organization and therefore have operational power.

• Framing power: An easy way to think of this is as linguistic skill. It’s the power to use language to frame things in a way so as to influence how people view them. An example is the joke in which a young priest goes to a bishop and asks, “Your Excellency, may I smoke while I pray?” The bishop angrily answers, “No! I can’t believe you’d ask such a thing.” A week later the chastened priest returns and asks, “Your Excellency, may I pray while I smoke?” The bishop answers, "Any time is a good time to pray, my son.” That’s the power of framing.
• Agenda power: This is the ability to influence what is or isn’t acted upon, which is significant because the things that are acted upon are the things that get priority and resources in an organization. For example, there’s a 2018 study that showed that fake news sites, by virtue of what issues they “covered,” were able to significantly influence the agenda for what mainstream media outlets covered.

Anyone Can Use the Sources of Power

Among the sources of power listed above, which do you think requires having a high rank or status in an organization? The truth is there’s only one: legitimate power. This is the only one in which the job title matters. All of the others can absolutely be wielded by everyone regardless of rank. While most people won’t wield all of the other nine sources of power, at least not simultaneously, it is absolutely possible for them to wield at least one or more of them at any given time, depending on their unique set of talents, skills, and interests.

Take coercive power, for example, which is a source of power that many would associate with legitimate power. It’s true that individuals who have legitimate power (e.g., your boss) exercise their coercive power all the time through various kinds of disciplinary actions. But ordinary employees frequently exercise their coercive power as well, even if they don’t recognize it as such. They typically do so through lack of engagement, reduced productivity , and more absenteeism and presenteeism—things that hurt the company. Sometimes it’s done consciously and sometimes unconsciously, but either way these reduced performance metrics are often how employees use their coercive power when they are dissatisfied with the leadership .

Real-Life Examples of Bottom-Up Power

The business world is full of real-life stories in which companies made a commitment to make their employees happy and then those employees, in return, rewarded the companies using their reward power. Employees’ reward power usually takes the opposite forms of their coercive power—in other words, higher engagement, more productivity, and reduced absenteeism and presenteeism.

Southwest Airlines is an example in which a company and its leadership have used their legitimate power to give more power to their employees , and the employees in turn have used their own power to reward them for it. Years ago, when the airline decided it was time for a new uniform, it put out an unconditional open call to all employees from all departments. Anyone who wanted to submit thoughts and ideas was invited to, and the company eventually narrowed the pool down to a team of 43 employees to serve as their uniform committee. By doing this, Southwest was granting expert power to employees who were not traditional fashion or uniform experts. They were also granting agenda power to these employees by letting them prioritize things like comfort, functionality, and machine washability for the new uniforms. Empowering their employees in this way has resulted in Southwest employees being more engaged and committed, which has led to consistent growth and success for the company.

There are many other stories of this kind of bottom-up use of power, and although the psychological drive to punish or reward is sometimes a factor, it isn’t always. Sometimes the cause is accidental, as is often the case with centrality power, based on where your office or desk is. Other times, it’s simply a natural result of your interests and training, as is often the case with expert power. The underlying point here is that whether by choice or accident, most sources of power can be tapped into regardless of your rank or position in an organization or society, and this is one of the most misunderstood aspects of power.

An exercise I often do with my students is to ask them, “Raise your hand if you want power.” Very few students, if any, raise their hands. I then use my framing power and rephrase the question: “Raise your hand if you want to be empowered.” Virtually everyone raises their hand. Power isn’t just something that belongs to high-status people. Power is also something that belongs to people of every status who can use it to serve and protect their own interests, sometimes against those very high-ranking people who might have slightly less than altruistic aims. But to do that it’s necessary to understand what types of power exist and how they can be wielded. Hopefully, this post can help serve that purpose.

Craig Barkacs, MBA, JD, is a professor of business law at the University of San Diego School of Business and a trial lawyer with three decades of experience as an attorney in high-profile cases.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Support Group
• International
• New Zealand
• South Africa
• Switzerland
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Therapy Center NEW
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Understanding what emotional intelligence looks like and the steps needed to improve it could light a path to a more emotionally adept world.

• Coronavirus Disease 2019
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

14.1 Power and Authority

Learning objectives.

• Define power and the three types of authority.
• List Weber’s three types of authority.
• Explain why charismatic authority may be unstable in the long run.

Politics refers to the distribution and exercise of power within a society, and polity refers to the political institution through which power is distributed and exercised. In any society, decisions must be made regarding the allocation of resources and other matters. Except perhaps in the simplest societies, specific people and often specific organizations make these decisions. Depending on the society, they sometimes make these decisions solely to benefit themselves and other times make these decisions to benefit the society as a whole. Regardless of who benefits, a central point is this: some individuals and groups have more power than others. Because power is so essential to an understanding of politics, we begin our discussion of politics with a discussion of power.

Power refers to the ability to have one’s will carried out despite the resistance of others. Most of us have seen a striking example of raw power when we are driving a car and see a police car in our rearview mirror. At that particular moment, the driver of that car has enormous power over us. We make sure we strictly obey the speed limit and all other driving rules. If, alas, the police car’s lights are flashing, we stop the car, as otherwise we may be in for even bigger trouble. When the officer approaches our car, we ordinarily try to be as polite as possible and pray we do not get a ticket. When you were 16 and your parents told you to be home by midnight or else, your arrival home by this curfew again illustrated the use of power, in this case parental power. If a child in middle school gives her lunch to a bully who threatens her, that again is an example of the use of power, or, in this case, the misuse of power.

These are all vivid examples of power, but the power that social scientists study is both grander and, often, more invisible (Wrong, 1996). Much of it occurs behind the scenes, and scholars continue to debate who is wielding it and for whose benefit they wield it. Many years ago Max Weber (1921/1978), one of the founders of sociology discussed in earlier chapters, distinguished legitimate authority as a special type of power. Legitimate authority (sometimes just called authority ), Weber said, is power whose use is considered just and appropriate by those over whom the power is exercised. In short, if a society approves of the exercise of power in a particular way, then that power is also legitimate authority. The example of the police car in our rearview mirrors is an example of legitimate authority.

Weber’s keen insight lay in distinguishing different types of legitimate authority that characterize different types of societies, especially as they evolve from simple to more complex societies. He called these three types traditional authority, rational-legal authority, and charismatic authority. We turn to these now.

Traditional Authority

As the name implies, traditional authority is power that is rooted in traditional, or long-standing, beliefs and practices of a society. It exists and is assigned to particular individuals because of that society’s customs and traditions. Individuals enjoy traditional authority for at least one of two reasons. The first is inheritance, as certain individuals are granted traditional authority because they are the children or other relatives of people who already exercise traditional authority. The second reason individuals enjoy traditional authority is more religious: their societies believe they are anointed by God or the gods, depending on the society’s religious beliefs, to lead their society. Traditional authority is common in many preindustrial societies, where tradition and custom are so important, but also in more modern monarchies (discussed shortly), where a king, queen, or prince enjoys power because she or he comes from a royal family.

Traditional authority is granted to individuals regardless of their qualifications. They do not have to possess any special skills to receive and wield their authority, as their claim to it is based solely on their bloodline or supposed divine designation. An individual granted traditional authority can be intelligent or stupid, fair or arbitrary, and exciting or boring but receives the authority just the same because of custom and tradition. As not all individuals granted traditional authority are particularly well qualified to use it, societies governed by traditional authority sometimes find that individuals bestowed it are not always up to the job.

Rational-Legal Authority

If traditional authority derives from custom and tradition, rational-legal authority derives from law and is based on a belief in the legitimacy of a society’s laws and rules and in the right of leaders to act under these rules to make decisions and set policy. This form of authority is a hallmark of modern democracies, where power is given to people elected by voters, and the rules for wielding that power are usually set forth in a constitution, a charter, or another written document. Whereas traditional authority resides in an individual because of inheritance or divine designation, rational-legal authority resides in the office that an individual fills, not in the individual per se. The authority of the president of the United States thus resides in the office of the presidency, not in the individual who happens to be president. When that individual leaves office, authority transfers to the next president. This transfer is usually smooth and stable, and one of the marvels of democracy is that officeholders are replaced in elections without revolutions having to be necessary. We might not have voted for the person who wins the presidency, but we accept that person’s authority as our president when he (so far it has always been a “he”) assumes office.

Rational-legal authority helps ensure an orderly transfer of power in a time of crisis. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Vice President Lyndon Johnson was immediately sworn in as the next president. When Richard Nixon resigned his office in disgrace in 1974 because of his involvement in the Watergate scandal, Vice President Gerald Ford (who himself had become vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned because of financial corruption) became president. Because the U.S. Constitution provided for the transfer of power when the presidency was vacant, and because U.S. leaders and members of the public accept the authority of the Constitution on these and so many other matters, the transfer of power in 1963 and 1974 was smooth and orderly.

Charismatic Authority

Charismatic authority stems from an individual’s extraordinary personal qualities and from that individual’s hold over followers because of these qualities. Such charismatic individuals may exercise authority over a whole society or only a specific group within a larger society. They can exercise authority for good and for bad, as this brief list of charismatic leaders indicates: Joan of Arc, Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus Christ, Muhammad, and Buddha. Each of these individuals had extraordinary personal qualities that led their followers to admire them and to follow their orders or requests for action.

Much of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s appeal as a civil rights leader stemmed from his extraordinary speaking skills and other personal qualities that accounted for his charismatic authority.

U.S. Library of Congress – public domain.

Charismatic authority can reside in a person who came to a position of leadership because of traditional or rational-legal authority. Over the centuries, several kings and queens of England and other European nations were charismatic individuals as well (while some were far from charismatic). A few U.S. presidents—Washington, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Kennedy, Reagan, and, for all his faults, even Clinton—also were charismatic, and much of their popularity stemmed from various personal qualities that attracted the public and sometimes even the press. Ronald Reagan, for example, was often called “the Teflon president,” because he was so loved by much of the public that accusations of ineptitude or malfeasance did not stick to him (Lanoue, 1988).

Weber emphasized that charismatic authority in its pure form (i.e., when authority resides in someone solely because of the person’s charisma and not because the person also has traditional or rational-legal authority) is less stable than traditional authority or rational-legal authority. The reason for this is simple: once charismatic leaders die, their authority dies as well. Although a charismatic leader’s example may continue to inspire people long after the leader dies, it is difficult for another leader to come along and command people’s devotion as intensely. After the deaths of all the charismatic leaders named in the preceding paragraph, no one came close to replacing them in the hearts and minds of their followers.

Because charismatic leaders recognize that their eventual death may well undermine the nation or cause they represent, they often designate a replacement leader, who they hope will also have charismatic qualities. This new leader may be a grown child of the charismatic leader or someone else the leader knows and trusts. The danger, of course, is that any new leaders will lack sufficient charisma to have their authority accepted by the followers of the original charismatic leader. For this reason, Weber recognized that charismatic authority ultimately becomes more stable when it is evolves into traditional or rational-legal authority. Transformation into traditional authority can happen when charismatic leaders’ authority becomes accepted as residing in their bloodlines, so that their authority passes to their children and then to their grandchildren. Transformation into rational-legal authority occurs when a society ruled by a charismatic leader develops the rules and bureaucratic structures that we associate with a government. Weber used the term routinization of charisma to refer to the transformation of charismatic authority in either of these ways.

Key Takeaways

• Power refers to the ability to have one’s will carried out despite the resistance of others.
• According to Max Weber, the three types of legitimate authority are traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic.
• Charismatic authority is relatively unstable because the authority held by a charismatic leader may not easily extend to anyone else after the leader dies.

For Your Review

• Think of someone, either a person you have known or a national or historical figure, whom you regard as a charismatic leader. What is it about this person that makes her or him charismatic?
• Why is rational-legal authority generally more stable than charismatic authority?

Lanoue, D. J. (1988). From Camelot to the teflon president: Economics and presidential popularaity since 1960. New York, NY: Greenwood Press.

Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work published 1921).

Wrong, D. H. (1996). Power: Its forms, bases, and uses . New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Sociology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Political Legitimacy

Political legitimacy is a virtue of political institutions and of the decisions—about laws, policies, and candidates for political office—made within them. This entry will survey the main answers that have been given to the following questions. First, how should legitimacy be defined? Is it primarily a descriptive or a normative concept? If legitimacy is understood normatively, what does it entail? Some associate legitimacy with the justification of coercive power and with the creation of political authority. Others associate it with the justification, or at least the sanctioning, of existing political authority. Authority stands for a right to rule—a right to issue commands and, possibly, to enforce these commands using coercive power. An additional question is whether legitimate political authority is understood to entail political obligations or not. Most people probably think it does. But some think that the moral obligation to obey political authority can be separated from an account of legitimate authority, or at least that such obligations arise only if further conditions hold.

Next there are questions about the requirements of legitimacy. When are political institutions and the decisions made within them appropriately called legitimate? Some have argued that this question must be answered primarily on the basis of procedural features of political decision-making. Others argue that legitimacy depends—exclusively or at least in part—on the substantive values that are realized. And on what grounds is the procedure versus substance question to be settled, is it on moral grounds— relating to values such as freedom or equality—or is it on epistemic grounds—relating to the epistemic merits of how political decisions are made? A related question is: does political legitimacy demand democracy or not? Insofar as democracy is seen as necessary for political legitimacy, when are democratic decisions legitimate? Can that question be answered with reference to procedural features only, or does democratic legitimacy depend both on procedural values and on the quality of the decisions made? And what is the role of epistemic considerations in this regard? Finally, there is the question which political institutions are subject to the legitimacy requirement. Historically, legitimacy was associated with the state and institutions and decisions within the state. The contemporary literature tends to judge this as too narrow, however. This raises the question how the concept of legitimacy may apply—beyond the nation state and decisions made within it—to the international and global context.

1. Descriptive and Normative Concepts of Political Legitimacy

2.1 legitimacy and the justification of political authority, 2.2 justifying power and coercion, 2.3 political legitimacy and political obligations, 3.1 consent, 3.2 public justification and political participation, 3.3 normative facts and epistemic advantage, 4.1 democratic instrumentalism, 4.2 pure proceduralist conceptions of democratic legitimacy, 4.3 alternative conceptions of democratic legitimacy, 5.1 political nationalism, 5.2 political cosmopolitanism, other internet resources, related entries.

If legitimacy is interpreted descriptively, it refers to people’s beliefs about political authority and, sometimes, political obligations. In his sociology, Max Weber put forward a very influential account of legitimacy that excludes any recourse to normative criteria (Mommsen 1989: 20, but see Greene 2017 for an alternative reading). According to Weber, that a political regime is legitimate means that its participants have certain beliefs or faith (“Legitimitätsglaube”) in regard to it: “the basis of every system of authority, and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey, is a belief, a belief by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent prestige” (Weber 1964: 382). As is well known, Weber distinguishes among three main sources of legitimacy—understood as the acceptance both of authority and of the need to obey its commands. People may have faith in a particular political or social order because it has been there for a long time (tradition), because they have faith in the rulers (charisma), or because they trust its legality—specifically the rationality of the rule of law (Weber 2009 [1918]; 1964). Weber identifies legitimacy as an important explanatory category for social science, because faith in a particular social order produces social regularities that are more stable than those that result from the pursuit of self-interest or from habitual rule-following (Weber 1964: 124).

In contrast to Weber’s descriptive concept, the normative concept of political legitimacy refers to some benchmark of acceptability or justification of political power or authority and—possibly—obligation. On one view, held by John Rawls (1993) and Arthur Ripstein (2004), for example, legitimacy refers, in the first instance, to the justification of coercive political power. Whether a political body such as a state is legitimate and whether citizens have political obligations towards it depends on whether the coercive political power that the state exercises is justified. On a widely held alternative view, legitimacy is linked to the justification of political authority. On this view, political bodies such as states may be effective, or de facto , authorities, without being legitimate. They claim the right to rule and to create obligations to be obeyed, and as long as these claims are met with sufficient acquiescence, they are authoritative. Legitimate authority, on this view, differs from merely effective or de facto authority in that it actually holds the right to rule and creates political obligations (e.g., Raz 1986). On some views, even legitimate authority is not sufficient to create political obligations. The thought is that a political authority (such as a state) may be permitted to issue commands that citizens are not obligated to obey (Dworkin 1986: 191). Based on a view of this sort, some have argued that legitimate political authority only gives rise to political obligations if additional normative conditions are satisfied (e.g. Wellman 1996; Edmundson 1998; Buchanan 2002).

There is sometimes a tendency in the literature to equate the normative concept of legitimacy with justice. Some explicitly define legitimacy as a criterion of minimal justice (e.g., Hampton 1998; Buchanan 2002). Someone might claim, for example, that while political institutions such as states are often unjust, only a just state is morally acceptable and legitimate in this sense. Unfortunately, there is sometimes also a tendency to blur the distinction between the two concepts, and a lot of confusion arises from that. Rawls (1993, 1995) clearly distinguishes between the two concepts. In his view, while justice and legitimacy are related—they draw on the same set of political values—they have different domains and legitimacy makes weaker demands than justice (1993: 225; 1995: 175ff.). Political institutions may be legitimate but unjust, but the converse is not possible: just political institutions are necessarily legitimate (see also Langvatn 2016 on this). On other views, legitimacy and justice have different normative foundations (e.g., Simmons 2001; Pettit 2012). According to Pettit (2012: 130ff), a state is just if it imposes a social order that promotes freedom as non-domination for all its citizens. It is legitimate if it imposes a social order in an appropriate way. A state that fails to impose a social order in an appropriate way, however just the social order may be, is illegitimate. Vice versa, a legitimate state may fail to impose a just social order.

Realist political theorists criticize any tendency to blur the distinction between legitimacy and justice (e.g., Rossi and Sleat 2014). They diagnose it as a sign of misplaced “political moralism” (Williams 2005; Horton 2010), or, relatedly, as a misleading interpretation of political theory as a branch of applied ethics (e.g., Honig 1993). But they also want to carve out an alternative to a purely descriptive interpretation of legitimacy. Bernard Williams’s claim (2005: 4ff) that political institutions are subject to a “basic legitimation demand” has been very influential in this regard. According to Williams, the first political question is how a state provides basic political goods such as security and stability and the conditions for cooperation. That it provides these goods is a necessary requirement for legitimacy, but it is not sufficient. A state is also under the normative expectation to justify how it provides these goods. That normative expectation is the distinctively political basic legitimation demand.

By interpreting the concept of political legitimacy along those lines, political realists lend support to those who have questioned a sharp distinction between the descriptive and normative concepts of legitimacy (e.g., Habermas 1979; Beetham 1991; Horton 2012). The objection to a strictly normative concept of legitimacy is that it is of only limited use in understanding actual processes of legitimation. The charge is that philosophers tend to focus too much on the general conditions necessary for the justification of political institutions but neglect the historical actualization of the justificatory process. In Jürgen Habermas’ words (Habermas 1979: 205): “Every general theory of justification remains peculiarly abstract in relation to the historical forms of legitimate domination. … Is there an alternative to this historical injustice of general theories, on the one hand, and the standardlessness of mere historical understanding, on the other?” The objection to a purely descriptive concept such as Weber’s is that it neglects people’s second order beliefs about legitimacy—their beliefs, not just about the actual legitimacy of a particular political institution, but about the justifiability of this institution, i.e. about what is necessary for legitimacy. According to Beetham, a “power relationship is not legitimate because people believe in its legitimacy, but because it can be justified in terms of their beliefs” (Beetham 1991: 11). As Tommie Shelby (2007) has highlighted, from the point of view of oppressed minorities political institutions often lack legitimacy because they (rightly) perceive the social order to be unjust.

A key claim of political realism is that while legitimacy is a normative property of political institutions or decisions, its normativity is not (just) moral (e.g., Rossi 2012, Sleat 2014). In support of this claim, some realists argue that the basic legitimation demand can’t be satisfied just by appeal to moral arguments, for example because political processes are necessary to forge political agreements (Stears 2007). Others focus on the role of epistemic normativity (see the discussion in Burelli and Destri 2022). But, as Leader Maynard and Worsnip (2018) ask, is there a distinct political normativity that political realists could resort to? Or does normative political philosophy have resources to address the realists’ worries? A possible reply to these questions is that realist political theory is less concerned with the nature of normativity than with drawing attention to neglected topics in political theory (Baderin 2014; Jubb 2019). But this raises the further question whether there is a unified project at the core of political realism, or whether it is better seen as the intersection of different projects motivated by a range of meta-normative, normative, and political concerns.

2. The Function of Political Legitimacy

This section lays out the different ways in which legitimacy, understood normatively, can be seen as relating to political authority, coercion, and political obligations.

The normative concept of political legitimacy is often seen as related to the justification of authority. The main function of political legitimacy, on this interpretation, is to explain the difference between merely effective or de facto authority and legitimate authority.

John Locke put forward such an interpretation of legitimacy. Locke’s starting-point is a state of nature in which all individuals are equally free to act within the constraints of natural law and no individual is subject to the will of another. As Rawls (2007: 129) characterizes Locke’s understanding of the state of nature, it is “a state of equal right, all being kings.” Natural law, while manifest in the state of nature, is not sufficiently specific to rule a society and cannot enforce itself when violated, however. The solution to this problem is a social contract that transfers political authority to a civil state that can realize and secure the natural law. According to Locke, and contrary to his predecessor Thomas Hobbes, the social contract thus does not create authority. Political authority is embodied in individuals and pre-exists in the state of nature. The social contract transfers the authority they each enjoy in the state of nature to a particular political body.

While political authority thus pre-exists in the state of nature, legitimacy is a concept that is specific to the civil state. Because the criterion of legitimacy that Locke proposes is historical, however, what counts as legitimate authority remains connected to the state of nature. The legitimacy of political authority in the civil state depends, according to Locke, on whether the transfer of authority has happened in the right way. Whether the transfer has happened in the right way depends on individuals’ consent: “no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent” (Locke 1980 [1690]: 52). Anyone who has given their express or tacit consent to the social contract is bound to obey a state’s laws (Locke 1980 [1690]: 63). Locke understands the consent criterion to apply not just to the original institutionalization of a political authority—what Rawls (2007: 124) calls “originating consent”. It also applies to the ongoing evaluation of the performance of a political regime—Rawls (2007: 124) calls this “joining consent”.

Although Locke emphasises consent, consent is not, however, sufficient for legitimate authority because an authority that suspends the natural law is necessarily illegitimate (e.g., Simmons 1976). On some interpretations of Locke (e.g., Pitkin 1965), consent is not even necessary for legitimate political authority; the absence of consent is only a marker of illegitimacy. Whether an actual political regime respects the constraints of the natural law is thus at least one factor that determines its legitimacy.

This criterion of legitimacy is negative: it offers an account of when effective authority ceases to be legitimate. When a political authority fails to secure consent or oversteps the boundaries of the natural law, it ceases to be legitimate and, therefore, there is no longer an obligation to obey its commands. For Locke—unlike for Hobbes—political authority can thus not be absolute.

The contemporary literature has developed Locke’s ideas in several ways. John Simmons (2001) uses them to argue that we should distinguish between the moral justification of states in general and the political legitimacy of actual states. We will come back to this point in section 3.2. Joseph Raz links legitimacy to the justification of political authority. According to Raz, political authority is just a special case of the more general concept of authority (1986, 1995, 2006). He defines authority in relation to a claim—of a person or an agency—to generate what he calls pre-emptive reasons. Such reasons replace other reasons for action that people might have. For example, if a teacher asks her students to do some homework, she expects her say-so to give the students reason to do the homework.

Authority is effective if it gets people to act on the reasons it generates. The difference between effective and legitimate authority, on Raz’ view, is that the former merely purports to change the reasons that apply to others, while legitimate authority actually has the capacity to change these reasons. Legitimate authority satisfies a pre-emption thesis: “The fact that an authority requires performance of an action is a reason for its performance which is not to be added to all other relevant reasons when assessing what to do, but should exclude and take the place of some of them” (Raz 1986: 46). (There are limits to what even a legitimate authority can rightfully order others to do, which is why it does not necessarily replace all relevant reasons.)

When is effective or de facto authority legitimate? In other words, what determines whether the pre-emption thesis is satisfied? Raz’ answer is captured in two further theses. The “dependence thesis” states that the justification of political authority depends on the normative reasons that apply to those under its rule directly, independently of the authority’s directives. Building on the dependence thesis, the “normal justification thesis” then states that political authority is justified if it enables those subject to it to better comply with the reasons that apply to them anyway. In full, the normal justification thesis says: “The normal way to establish that a person has authority over another involves showing that the alleged subject is likely to better comply with the reasons which apply to him (other than the alleged authoritative directive) if he accepts the directives of the alleged authority as authoritatively binding and tries to follow them, rather than by trying to follow the reasons which apply to him directly” (Raz 1986: 53). The normal justification thesis explains why those governed by a legitimate authority ought to treat its directives as binding. It thus follows as a corollary of the normal justification thesis that such an authority generates a duty to be obeyed. Raz calls his conception the “service conception” of authority (1986: 56). Note that even though legitimate authority is defined as a special case of effective authority, only the former is appropriately described as a serving its subjects. Illegitimate—but effective—authority does not serve those it aims to govern, although it may purport to do so.

William Edmundson formulates this way of linking authority and legitimacy via a condition he calls the warranty thesis: “If being an X entails claiming to F , then being a legitimate X entails truly claiming to F .” (Edmundson 1998: 39). Being an X here stands for “a state”, or “an authority”. And “to F ” stands for “to create a duty to be obeyed”, for example. The idea expressed by the warranty thesis is that legitimacy morally justifies an independently existing authority such that the claims of the authority become moral obligations.

Those who link political legitimacy to the problem of justifying authority tend to think of political coercion as only a means that legitimate states may use to secure their authority. As Leslie Green puts it: “Coercion threats provide secondary, reinforcing motivation when the political order fails in its primary normative technique of authoritative guidance” (Green 1988: 75). According to a second important view, held by Rawls (1993), for example, the main function of legitimacy is precisely to justify coercive power. (For an excellent discussion of the two interpretations of legitimacy and a defense of the coercion-based interpretation, see Ripstein 2004; see also Hampton 1998.) On coercion-based interpretations, the main problem that a conception of legitimacy aims to solve is how to distinguish the rightful use of political power from mere coercion. Whether a political body such as a state is legitimate and whether citizens have political obligations towards it depends, on this view on whether the coercive political power that the state exercises is justified. Again, there are different ways in which this idea might be understood.

In Thomas Hobbes’ influential account, political authority is created by the social contract. In the state of nature, everyone’s self-preservation is under threat, and this makes it rational for all to consent to a covenant that authorizes a sovereign who can guarantee their protection and to transfer their rights to this sovereign—an individual or a group of individuals. When there is no such sovereign, one may be created by a covenant—Hobbes calls this “sovereignty by institution”. But political authority may also be established by the promise of all to obey a threatening power (“sovereignty by acquisition”; see Leviathan , chapter 17). Both manners of creating a sovereign are equally legitimate. And political authority will be legitimate as long as the sovereign ensures the protection of the citizens, as Hobbes believes that the natural right to self-preservation cannot be relinquished ( Leviathan , chapter 21). Beyond that, however, there can be no further questions about the legitimacy of the sovereign. In particular, there is no distinction between effective authority and legitimate authority in Hobbes’ thought. It might even be argued that Hobbes fails to distinguish between legitimate authority and the mere exercise of power (Korsgaard 1997: 29; see chapter 30 of Leviathan , however, for an account of the quality of the sovereign’s rule).

Another way in which the relation between legitimacy and the creation of authority may be understood is that the attempt to rule without legitimacy is an attempt to exercise coercive power—not authority. Such a view can be found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work. Legitimacy, for Rousseau, justifies the state’s exercise of coercive power and creates an obligation to obey. Rousseau contrasts a legitimate social order with a system of rules that is merely the expression of power. Coercive power is primarily a feature of the civil state. While there are some forms of coercive power even in the state of nature—for example the power of parents over their children—Rousseau assumes that harmful coercive power arises primarily in the civil state and that this creates the problem of legitimacy. In the first chapter of the first book of On the Social Contract he remarks that while “[m]an is born free”, the civil state he observes makes everyone a slave. Rousseau’s main question is under what conditions a civil state, which uses coercive power to back up its laws, can be thought of as freeing citizens from this serfdom. Such a state would be legitimate. As he puts it in the opening sentence of the Social Contract , “I want to inquire whether there can be some legitimate and sure rule of administration in the civil order, taking men as they are and laws as they might be.”

Rousseau’s account of legitimacy is importantly different from Locke’s in that Rousseau does not attach normativity to the process through which a civil state emerges from the state of nature. Legitimate political authority is created by convention, reached within the civil state. Specifically, Rousseau suggests that legitimacy arises from the democratic justification of the laws of the civil state ( Social Contract I:6; cf. section 3.3. below).

For Immanuel Kant, as for Hobbes, political authority is created by the establishment of political institutions in the civil state. It does not pre-exist in individuals in the state of nature. What exists in the pre-civil social state, according to Kant, is the moral authority of each individual qua rational being and a moral obligation to form a civil state. Establishing a civil state is “in itself an end (that each ought to have )” (Kant, Theory and Practice 8:289; see also Perpetual Peace , Appendix I). Kant regards the civil state as a necessary first step toward a moral order (the “ethical commonwealth”). It helps people conform to certain rules by eliminating what today would be called the free-riding problem or the problem of partial compliance. By creating a coercive order of public legal justice, “a great step is taken toward morality (though it is not yet a moral step), toward being attached to this concept of duty even for its own sake” (Kant, Perpetual Peace 8:376, notes to Appendix I; see also Riley 1982: 129 f ).

The civil state, according to Kant, establishes the rights necessary to secure equal freedom. Unlike for Locke and his contemporary followers, however, coercive power is not a secondary feature of the civil state, necessary to back up laws. According to Kant, coercion is part of the idea of rights. The thought can be explained as follows. Coercion is defined as a restriction of the freedom to pursue one’s own ends. Any right of a person—independently of whether it is respected or has been violated—implies a restriction for others. (cf. Kant, Theory and Practice , Part 2; Ripstein 2004: 8; Flikschuh 2008: 389f). Coercion, in this view, is thus not merely a means for the civil state to enforce rights as defenders of an authority-based concept of legitimacy claim. Instead, according to Kant, it is constitutive of the civil state. This understanding of rights links Kant’s conception of legitimacy to the justification of coercion.

Legitimacy, for Kant, depends on a particular interpretation of the social contract. For Kant, the social contract which establishes the civil state is not an actual event. He accepts David Hume’s objection to Locke that the civil state is often established in an act of violence (Hume “Of the Original Contract”). Kant invokes the social contract, instead, as the test “of any public law’s conformity with right” (Kant Theory and Practice 8:294). The criterion is the following: each law should be such that all individuals could have consented to it. The social contract, according to Kant, is thus a hypothetical thought experiment, meant to capture an idea of public reason. As such, it sets the standard for what counts as legitimate political authority. Because of his particular interpretation of the social contract, Kant is not a social contract theorist in the strict sense. The idea of a contract is nevertheless relevant for his understanding of legitimacy. (On the difference between voluntaristic and rationalistic strands in liberalism, see Waldron 1987.)

Kant, unlike Hobbes, recognizes the difference between legitimate and effective authority. For the head of the civil state is under an obligation to obey public reason and to enact only laws to which all individuals could consent. If he violates this obligation, however, he still holds authority, even if his authority ceases to be legitimate. This view is best explained in relation to Kant’s often criticized position on the right to revolution. Kant famously denied that there is a right to revolution (Kant, Perpetual Peace , Appendix II; for a recent discussion, see Flikschuh 2008). Kant stresses that while “a people”—as united in the civil state—is sovereign, its individual members are under the obligation to obey the head of the state thus established. This obligation is such that it is incompatible with a right to revolution. Kant offers a transcendental argument for his position (Kant Perpetual Peace , Appendix II; Arendt 1992). A right to revolution would be in contradiction with the idea that individuals are bound by public law, but without the idea of citizens being bound by public law, there cannot be a civil state—only anarchy. As mentioned earlier, however, there is a duty to establish a civil state. Kant’s position implies that the obligation of individuals to obey a head of state is not conditioned upon the ruler’s performance. In particular, the obligation to obey does not cease when the laws are unjust.

Kant’s position on the right to revolution may suggest that he regards political authority as similarly absolute as Hobbes. But Kant stresses that the head of state is bound by the commands of public reason. This is manifest in his insistence on freedom of the pen: “a citizen must have, with the approval of the ruler himself, the authorization to make known publicly his opinions about what it is in the ruler’s arrangements that seems to him to be a wrong against the commonwealth” (Kant Theory and Practice 8:304). While there is no right to revolution, political authority is only legitimate if the head of state respects the social contract. But political obligations arise even from illegitimate authority. If the head of state acts in violation of the social contract and hence of public reason, for example by restricting citizens’ freedom of political criticism, citizens are still obligated to obey.

In 2004, Ripstein argued that much of the contemporary literature on political legitimacy has been dominated by a focus on the justification of authority, rather than coercive political power (Ripstein 2004). In the literature since then, it looks as if the tables are turning, especially if one considers the debates on international and global legitimacy (section 5). But prominent earlier coercion-based accounts include those by Nagel (1987) and by contemporary Kantians such as Rawls and Habermas (to be discussed in sections 3.3. and 4.3., respectively).

Let me briefly mention other important coercion-based interpretations. Jean Hampton (1998; drawing on Anscombe 1981) offers an elegant contemporary explication of Hobbes’ view. According to her, political authority “is invented by a group of people who perceive that this kind of special authority as necessary for the collective solution of certain problems of interaction in their territory and whose process of state creation essentially involves designing the content and structure of that authority so that it meets what they take to be their needs” (Hampton 1998: 77). Her theory links the authority of the state to its ability to enforce a solution to coordination and cooperation problems. Coercion is the necessary feature that enables the state to provide an effective solution to these problems, and the entitlement to use coercion is what constitutes the authority of the state. The entitlement to use coercion distinguishes such minimally legitimate political authority from a mere use of power. Hampton draws a further distinction between minimal legitimacy and what she calls full moral legitimacy, which obtains when political authority is just.

Buchanan (2002) also argues that legitimacy is concerned with the justification of coercive power. Buchanan points out that this makes legitimacy a more fundamental normative concept than authority. Like Hampton, he advocates a moralized interpretation of legitimacy. According to him, “an entity has political legitimacy if and only if it is morally justified in wielding political power” (2002: 689). Political authority, in his approach, obtains if an entity is legitimate in this sense and if some further conditions, relating to political obligation, are met (2002: 691). Anna Stilz (2009) offers a coercion-centered account of state legitimacy that draws on both Kant and Rousseau.

Historically speaking, the dominant view has been that legitimate political authority entails political obligations. Locke, for example, writes: “every man, by consenting with others to make one body politic under one government, puts himself under an obligation to every one of that society to submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded by it; or else this original compact, whereby he with others incorporates into one society, would signify nothing, and be no compact if he be left free and under no other ties than he was in before in the state of nature” (Locke 2009 [1690]: 52f).

While this is still the view many hold, not all do. Some take the question of what constitutes legitimate authority to be distinct from the question of what political obligations people have. Ronald Dworkin (1986: 191) treats political obligations as a fundamental normative concept in its own right. What he calls “associative obligations” arise, not from legitimate political authority, but directly from membership in a political community. (For a critical discussion of this account, see Simmons 2001; Wellman 1996.)

Arthur Applbaum (2019) offers a conceptual argument to challenge the view that legitimate political authority entails an obligation to obey. Applbaum grants that legitimate political authority has the capacity to change the normative status of those under its rule, as Raz (1986), for example, has influentially argued, and that this capacity should be interpreted as a moral power in Hohfeld’s sense, not as a claim right to rule. But, Applbaum argues, Hohfeldian powers, unlike rights, are not correlated with duties; they are correlated with liabilities. On Applbaum’s view, legitimate political authority thus has the capacity to create a liability for those under its rule, but not an obligation. To be liable to legitimate political authority means to not be free from the authority’s power or control. To be sure, the liability might be to be subject to a duty, but to be liable to be put under a duty to obey should not be confused with being under a duty to obey (see also Perry 2013 on this distinction).

Views that dissociate legitimate authority from political obligation have some appeal to those who aim to counter Robert Paul Wolff’s influential anarchist argument. The argument highlights what today is sometimes called the subjection problem (Perry 2013): how can autonomous individuals be under a general—content-independent—obligation to subject their will to the will of someone else? A content-independent obligation to obey the state is an obligation to obey a state’s directives as such, independently of their content. Wolff (1970) argues that because there cannot be such a general obligation to obey the state, states are necessarily illegitimate.

Edmundson (1998) has a first response to the anarchist challenge. He argues that while legitimacy establishes a justification for the state to issue directives, it does not create even a prima facie duty to obey its commands. He claims that the moral duty to obey the commands of legitimate political authority arises only if additional conditions are met.

Simmons (2001) has a different response to Wolff. Simmons draws a distinction between the moral justification of states and the political legitimacy of a particular, historically realized, state and its directives. According to Simmons, the state’s justification depends on its moral defensibility. If it can successfully be shown that having a state is morally better than not having a state (Simmons 2001: 125), the state is justified. But moral justification is only necessary, not sufficient, for political legitimacy, according to Simmons. The reason is that our moral obligations are to everyone, including citizens of other states, not to the particular state we live in. A particular state’s legitimacy, understood as the capacity to generate and enforce a duty to obey, depends on citizens’ actual consent. While there is no general moral duty to obey the particular state we live in, we may have a political obligation to obey if we have given our prior consent to this state. The absence of a general moral duty to obey the state thus does not imply that all states are necessarily illegitimate (Simmons 2001: 137).

3. Sources of Political Legitimacy

Insofar as legitimacy, understood normatively, determines which political institutions and which decisions made within them are justified or acceptable, and, in some cases, what kind of obligations people who are governed by these institutions incur, there is the question of what makes political institutions and political decisions legitimate. As we’ll see, this question has both a normative and a meta-normative dimension (see Peter 2023 for more on this distinction). This section briefly reviews different accounts that have been given of the sources of legitimacy.

While there is a strong voluntarist line of thought in Christian political philosophy, it was in the 17 th century that consent came to be seen as the main source of political legitimacy. The works of Hugo Grotius, Hobbes, and Samuel Pufendorf tend to be seen as the main turning point that eventually led to the replacement of natural law and divine authority theories of legitimacy (see Schneewind 1998; Hampton 1998). The following passage from Grotius’ On the Law of War and Peace expresses the modern perspective: “But as there are several Ways of Living, some better than others, and every one may chuse which he pleases of all those Sorts; so a People may chuse what Form of Government they please: Neither is the Right which the Sovereign has over his Subjects to be measured by this or that Form, of which divers Men have different Opinions, but by the Extent of the Will of those who conferred it upon him” (cited by Tuck 1993: 193). It was Locke’s version of social contract theory that elevated consent to the main source of the legitimacy of political authority.

Raz helpfully distinguishes among three ways in which the relation between consent and legitimate political authority may be understood (1995: 356): (i) consent of those governed is a necessary condition for the legitimacy of political authority; (ii) consent is not directly a condition for legitimacy, but the conditions for the legitimacy of authority are such that only political authority that enjoys the consent of those governed can meet them; (iii) the conditions of legitimate political authority are such that those governed by that authority are under an obligation to consent. There is a question, however, whether versions of (ii) and (iii) are best understood as versions of a consent theory of political legitimacy, or whether they are versions of an alternative justificationist theory (Stark 2000; Peter 2023).

Locke and his contemporary followers such as Robert Nozick (1974) or Simmons (2001), but also Rousseau and his followers defend a version of (i)—the most typical form that consent theories take. Amanda Greene (2016) defends a version of this view she calls the quality consent view. One question that all versions of (i) must address is whether consent must be explicit or whether tacit consent, expressed by residency, is sufficient (see Puryear 2021 for a defence of the latter).

Versions of (ii) appeal to those who reject actual consent as a basis for legitimacy, as they only regard consent given under ideal conditions as binding. Theories of hypothetical consent, such as those articulated by Kant or Rawls, fall into this category. Such theories view political authority as legitimate only if those governed would consent under certain ideal conditions (cf. section 3.2).

David Estlund (2008: 117ff) defends a version of hypothetical consent theory that matches category (iii). What he calls “normative consent” is a theory that regards non-consent to authority, under certain conditions as invalid. Authority, in this view, may thus be justified without actual consent. Estlund defines authority as the moral power to require action. Estlund uses normative consent theory as the basis for an account of democratic legitimacy, understood as the permissibility of using coercion to enforce authority. The work that normative consent theory does in Estlund’s account is that it contributes to the justification of the authority of the democratic collective over those who disagree with certain democratically approved laws.

Although consent theory has been dominating for a long time, there are many well-known objections to it. As we will explain more fully in the next section, Simmons (2001) argues that hypothetical consent theories (and, presumably, normative consent theories, too) conflate moral justification with legitimation, and that only actual consent can legitimize political institutions. Other objections, especially to Lockean versions, are about as old as consent theory itself. David Hume, in his essay “Of the Original Contract”, and many after him object to Locke that consent is not feasible, and that actual states have almost always arisen from acts of violence. The attempt to legitimize political authority via consent is thus, at best, wishful thinking (Wellman 1996). What is worse, it may obscure problematic structures of subordination (Pateman 1988). Hume’s own solution to this problem was, like Bentham later, to propose to justify political authority with reference to its beneficial consequences (see section 3.3).

An important legacy of consent theory in contemporary thought is manifest in accounts that attribute the source of legitimacy either to an idea of public reason—taking the lead from Kant—or to a theory of democratic participation—taking the lead from Rousseau. Theories of deliberative democracy combine elements of both accounts.

Public reason accounts tend to focus on the problem of justifying political coercion. The solution they propose is that political coercion is justified if it is supported on the basis of reasons that all reasonable persons can share. Interest in public reason accounts started with Rawls’ Political Liberalism, but Rawls developed the idea more fully in later works. Rawls’ starting-point is the following problem of legitimacy (Rawls 2001: 41): “in the light of what reasons and values … can citizens legitimately exercise … coercive power over one another?” The solution to this problem that Rawls proposes is the following “liberal principle of legitimacy”: “political power is legitimate only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution (written or unwritten) the essentials of which all citizens, as reasonable and rational, can endorse in the light of their common human reason” (Rawls 2001: 41; see Michelman 2022 for an extensive discussion of constitutional essentials).

Rawls’ idea of public reason, which is at the core of the liberal principle of legitimacy, rests on the method of “political”—as opposed to “metaphysical”—justification that Rawls has developed in response to critics of his theory of justice as fairness (Rawls 1993). This means that public reason should be “freestanding” in the same way as his theory of justice is. Public reason should involve only political values and be independent of—potentially controversial—comprehensive moral or religious doctrines of the good. This restricts the content of public reason to what is given by the family of what Rawls calls political conceptions of justice (Rawls 2001: 26). Rawls recognizes that because the content of the idea of public reason is restricted, the domain to which it should apply must be restricted too. The question is: in what context is it important that the restriction on reason is observed? Rawls conceives of the domain of public reason as limited to matters of constitutional essentials and basic justice and as applying primarily—but not only—to judges, government officials, and candidates for public office when they decide on matters of constitutional essentials and basic justice.

Simmons (2001) criticizes Rawls’ approach for mistakenly blurring the distinction between justifying the state and political legitimacy (see also section 2.3.). A Rawlsian could reply, however, that the problem of legitimacy centrally involves the justification of coercion, and that legitimacy should thus be understood as what creates—rather than merely justifies—political authority. The following thought supports this claim. Rawls—in Political Liberalism —explicitly focuses on the democratic context. It is a particular feature of democracy that the right to rule is created by those who are ruled. As Hershovitz puts it in his critique of the Razian approach to political legitimacy, in a democracy there is no sharp division between the “binders” and the “bound” (2003: 210f). The political authority of democracy is thus entailed by some account of the conditions under which citizens may legitimately exercise coercive power over one another (see Viehoff 2014 and Kolodny 2023 on this question). But even if Simmons’ objection can be refuted in this way, a further problem for public reason accounts is whether they can successfully show that some form of public justification is indeed required for political legitimacy (see Enoch 2015).

Recent public reason accounts have developed Rawls’ original idea in different ways (see also the entry on public reason). Those following Rawls more closely will understand public reasons as reasons that attract a—hypothetical—consensus. On this interpretation, a public reason is a reason that all reasonable persons can be expected to endorse. The target of the consensus is either the political decisions themselves or the procedure through which political decisions are made. On a common reading today, the Rawlsian idea of public reason is understood in terms of a hypothetical consensus on substantive reasons (e.g., Quong 2011; Hartley and Watson 2018). On those conceptions, the use of political coercion is legitimate if it is supported by substantive reasons that all reasonable persons can be expected to endorse. The problem with this interpretation of public reason is that the demand for a consensus on substantive reasons in circumstances of moral and religious pluralism and disagreement either relies on a very restrictive characterization of reasonable persons or ends up with a very limited domain for legitimate political coercion.

Rawls’ conception of political legitimacy can also be understood in terms of procedural reasons (Peter 2008). On this interpretation, the domain of public reason is limited to the justification of the process of political decision-making, and need not extend to the substantive (as opposed to the procedural) reasons that justify a decision. For example, if public reason supports democratic decision-making, then the justification for a decision is that it has been made democratically. Of course, a political decision that is legitimate in virtue of the procedure in which it has been made may not be fully just. But this is just a reflection of the fact that legitimacy is a weaker idea than justice.

An alternative interpretation of the public reason account focuses on convergence, not consensus (Gaus 2011; Vallier 2011; Vallier and Muldoon 2020). A political decision is legitimized on the basis of public reason, on this account, if reasonable persons can converge on that decision. They need not agree on the—substantive or procedural—reasons that support a decision. Instead, it is argued, it is sufficient for political legitimacy if all can agree that a particular decision should be made, even if they disagree about the reasons that support this decision. Note that the convergence needs not be actual; it can be hypothetical.

Accounts that emphasize political participation or political influence regard a political decision as legitimate only if it has been made in a process that allows for equal participation of all relevant persons. They thus see political legitimacy as dependent on the participation or influence of all, to paraphrase Bernard Manin’s (1987) expression, not on the will of all, as consent theories do, or on a justification all can access, as public reason accounts do. Older accounts of this kind focus on democratic participation (Pateman 1970). Newer accounts include deliberative democracy accounts (Manin 1987), Philipp Pettit’s equal control view (Pettit 2012), and Lafont’s theory of democratic legitimacy (Lafont 2019).

Rousseau’s solution to the problem of how to explain the legitimacy of political decisions has influenced many contemporary democratic theorists (see section 4.3.). One of the important departures from Locke’s version of social contract theory that Rousseau proposes is that tacit consent is not sufficient for political legitimacy. Without citizens’ active participation in the justification of a state’s laws, Rousseau maintains, there is no legitimacy. According to Rousseau, one’s will cannot be represented, as this would distort the general will, which alone is the source of legitimacy: “The engagements that bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual… the general will, to be truly such, should be general in its object as well as in its essence; … it should come from all to apply to all; and … it loses its natural rectitude when it is directed towards any individual, determinate object” (Rousseau, Social Contract , II:4; see also ibid . I:3 and Rawls 2007: 231f).

Rousseau distinguishes among a citizen’s private will, which reflects personal interests, a citizen’s general will, which reflects an interpretation of the common good, and the general will, which truly reflects the common good. A democratic decision is always about the common good. In democratic decision-making, citizens thus compare their interpretations of the general will. If properly conducted, it reveals the general will. This is the legitimate decision.

Active participation by all may not generate a consensus. So why would those who oppose a particular decision be bound by that decision? Rousseau’s answer to this question is the following. On Rousseau’s view, citizens can—and will want to—learn from democratic decisions. Since the democratic decision, if conducted properly, correctly reveals the general will, those who voted against a particular proposal will recognize that they were wrong and will adjust their beliefs about what the general will is. In this ingenious way, individuals are only bound by their own will, but everyone is bound by a democratic decision.

The theories of political legitimacy reviewed in the previous two sections take the citizens’ will, whether expressed through their actual consent, supported by shared or converging reasons, or established through processes of political participation, as the ground of political legitimacy. While such will-based conceptions have dominated the philosophical literature on political legitimacy, they are not the only conceptions on offer. There are two main alternatives, as well as hybrid conceptions (see Peter 2023). A first alternative are fact-based conceptions of political legitimacy, according to which the legitimacy of political institutions and decisions depends on whether they accord with normative facts. Utilitarian theories, which focus on the beneficial consequences of political institutions and the decisions made within them, are a good example. According to belief-based conceptions, as articulated in epistocratic conceptions and in some epistemic theories of democracy, the source of political legitimacy is some form of epistemic advantage that supports the justification of political decisions. In this section, we expand on the two main alternatives to will-based conceptions of political legitimacy.

In the utilitarian view, legitimate political authority should be grounded on the principle of utility. The relevant normative facts are facts concerning the maximization of happiness or utility. Christian Thomasius, a student of Pufendorf and contemporary of Locke, may be seen as a precursor of the utilitarian approach to political legitimacy, as he rejected voluntarism and endorsed the idea that political legitimacy depends on principles of rational prudence instead (Schneewind 1998: 160; Barnard 2001: 66). Where Thomasius differs from the utilitarians, however, is in his attempt to identify a distinctively political—not moral or legal—source of legitimacy. He developed the idea of “decorum” into a theory of how people should relate to one another in the political context. Decorum is best described as a principle of “civic mutuality” (Barnard 2001: 65): “You treat others as you would expect them to treat you” (Thomasius, Foundations of the Law of Nature and of Nations , quoted by Barnard 2001: 65). By thus distinguishing legitimacy from legality and justice, Thomasius adopted an approach that was considerably ahead of his time.

Jeremy Bentham (in Anarchical Fallacies ) rejects the Hobbesian idea that political authority is created by a social contract. According to Bentham, it is the state that creates the possibility of binding contracts. The problem of legitimacy that the state faces is which of its laws are justified. Bentham proposes that legitimacy depends on whether a law contributes to the happiness of the citizens. (For a contemporary take on this utilitarian principle of legitimacy, see Binmore 2000.)

A well-known problem with the view that Bentham articulates is that it justifies restrictions of rights that liberals find unacceptable. John Stuart Mill’s answer to this objection consists, on the one hand, in an argument for the compatibility between utilitarianism and the protection of liberty rights and, on the other, in an instrumentalist defense of democratic political authority based on the principle of utility. According to Mill, both individual freedom and the right to participate in politics are necessary for the self-development of individuals (Mill On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government , see Brink 1992; Ten 1998).

With regard to the defense of liberty rights, Mill argues that the restriction of liberty is illegitimate unless it is permitted by the harm principle, that is, unless the actions suppressed by the restriction harm others ( On Liberty , chapter 1; for a critical discussion of the harm principle as the basis of legitimacy, see Wellman 1996; see also Turner 2014). Mill’s view of the instrumental value of (deliberative) democracy is expressed in the following passage of the first chapter of On Liberty : “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided that the end be their improvement and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.” Deliberation is important, according to Mill, because of his belief in the power of ideas—in what Habermas would later call the force of the better argument (Habermas 1990: 158ff). Deliberation should keep partisan interests, which could threaten legitimacy by undermining the general happiness, in check: “The representative system ought … not to allow any of the various sectional interests to be so powerful as to be capable of prevailing against truth and justice and the other sectional interests combined. There ought always to be such a balance preserved among personal interests as may render any one of them dependent for its successes, on carrying with it at least a large proportion of those who act on higher motives, and more comprehensive and distant views” (Mill, Collected Works XIX: 447, cited by Ten 1998: 379).

Many are not convinced that such instrumentalist reasoning provides a satisfactory account of political legitimacy. Rawls (1971:175ff) and Jeremy Waldron (1987: 143ff) object that the utilitarian approach will ultimately only convince those who stand to benefit from the felicific calculus, and that it lacks an argument to convince those who stand to lose.

Can fact-based conceptions of political legitimacy address this problem? Fair play theories offer one solution to this problem (see Klosko 2004 and the entry on political obligation ). Wellman’s (1996) samaritan account of political legitimacy is also an attempt to overcome this problem. In his account, a state’s legitimacy depends on it being justified to use coercion to enforce its laws. His suggestion is that the justification of the state can be grounded in the samaritan duty to help others in need. The thought is that “what ultimately legitimizes a state’s imposition upon your liberty is not merely the services it provides you , but the benefits it provides others ” (Wellman 1996: 213; his emphasis). Wellman argues that because “political society is the only vehicle with which people can escape the perils of the state of nature” (Wellman 1996: 216), people have a samaritan duty to provide to one another the benefits of a state. Associated restrictions of their liberty by the state, Wellman claims, are legitimate.

Perfectionist theories offer another alternative. Perfectionist conceptions can be found in ancient Chinese philosophy (see Chan 2013; Jiang 2021). The best-known perfectionist theory in contemporary Western political philosophy is Raz’ service conception of legitimate authority (section 2.1). Raz tries to show how an account of legitimacy based on beneficial consequences is compatible with everyone having reasons to obey the directives of a legitimate authority. According to Raz (1995: 359), “[g]overnments decide what is best for their subjects and present them with the results as binding conclusions that they are bound to follow.” The justification for this view that Raz gives (“the normal justification thesis”) is, as explained above, that if the authority is legitimate, its directives are such that they help those governed to better comply with reasons that apply to them. (For criticisms of this approach, see Hershovitz 2003 and 2011, Nussbaum 2011, and Quong 2011).

Perfectionist theories are often cast as versions of fact-based conceptions of political legitimacy. But, as Plato highlighted in the Republic , there isn’t just the question of what the right political decisions are, whether construed as those that maximize utility, honor our duties, or realize some perfectionist ideal. There is also the question of who should be in charge. And the answer that Plato gave to that second question echoes a belief-based conception of political legitimacy: it’s those who know best and who are capable of ruling accordingly (Estlund 2003). Seen in that light, even Raz’ service conception of political legitimacy appears as a belief-based conception. It holds that “epistemic abstinence” is not an option (Raz 1995) and that political authority is legitimate if held by those who know best what reasons apply to all citizens and exercised accordingly (see Peter 2023 for this interpretation of Raz’ service conception).

Belief-based conceptions of political legitimacy span versions of epistocracy as well as versions of epistemic democracy. I’ll have more to say about epistemic democracy in section 4, so let me focus on epistocratic conceptions here. Epistocratic conceptions of political legitimacy are best understood in opposition to the democratic commitment to strict political equality among the citizens (see section 4). The idea is captured by Jason Brennan’s “antiauthority tenet” (Brennan 2016: 17), which echoes David Estlund’s “authority tenet” (2008: 30): “When some citizens are morally unreasonable, ignorant, or incompetent about politics, this justifies not permitting them to exercise political authority over others.”

Epistocratic conceptions of political legitimacy can support the legitimacy of authoritarianism, assuming that there is an authoritarian elite that has the right kind of political knowledge and is able to effectively rule on that basis. We should not equate epistocracy with authoritarianism, however, as epistocracy is also compatible with a Millian plurality voting scheme and similar political regimes. Still, as highlighted by Ross Mittiga (2022) and Fabienne Peter (2023), the question has to be addressed whether non-democratic political decision-making can be legitimate in circumstances where the threats to citizens’ lives are enormous (through climate change, for example, or pandemics), the evidence for what needs to be done is sufficiently robust, and the democratic process is failing to address the issues.

An important objection to belief-based conceptions of political legitimacy is that they conflate political authority and epistemic authority (Estlund 2008, Darwall 2010, Lafont 2019; see also section 4 below). Raz (2010) rejects this objection, arguing that it only shows that epistemic authority is not sufficient for political authority, not that it is not necessary. Peter (2023) argues that even if this objection can be refuted, belief-based conceptions of political legitimacy often (but not necessarily always) fail because political decision-making remains epistemically underdetermined.

4. Political Legitimacy and Democracy

This section takes a closer look at the relationship between democracy and political legitimacy. In contemporary political philosophy, many, but by no means all, hold that democracy is necessary for political legitimacy. Democratic instrumentalism is the view that democratic decision-making procedures are at best a means for reaching just outcomes, and whether or not legitimacy requires democracy depends on the outcomes that democratic decision-making brings about. Thomas Christiano (2004) helpfully distinguishes between monistic conceptions of political legitimacy and non-monistic ones. Democratic instrumentalism is a monistic view. It reduces the normativity of political legitimacy to a single dimension: only the quality of the outcomes a particular political regime generates is relevant for political legitimacy. The main alternative in contemporary political philosophy is a form of proceduralism according to which democracy is necessary for political legitimacy, independently of its instrumental value (Buchanan 2002). Some such proceduralist conceptions of democratic legitimacy are also monistic. What is commonly called pure proceduralism is an example of a monistic view. According to pure proceduralism only procedural features of decision-making are relevant for democratic legitimacy. Many philosophers are drawn to non-monistic conceptions of democratic legitimacy. Such mixed conceptions of democratic legitimacy combine conditions that refer to the quality of outcomes of democratic decision-making with conditions that apply to procedural features.

Democratic instrumentalism is sometimes used to argue against democracy. According to arguments of this kind, some ideal of good outcomes, however defined, forms the standard that determines political legitimacy (see section 3.3). If democracy does not contribute to better outcomes than an alternative decision-making procedure, it is not necessary for political legitimacy. The instrumentalist accounts of Richard Arneson (2003) and Steven Wall (2007), for example, refer to some ideal egalitarian distribution. In their view, the legitimacy of political institutions and the decisions made within them depends on how closely they approximate the ideal egalitarian distribution. If sacrificing political equality allows for a better approximation of equality overall, so their argument goes, then this does not undermine legitimacy.

One problem with this view is that it treats political equality as less important than the other kinds of equality that inform the perfectionist standard. This is implausible to those who take political equality to be one of the most important egalitarian values (e.g., Rawls 1993; Buchanan 2002; Christiano 2008). In addition, anti-democratic instrumentalism is at odds with the view that many democrats hold—that democratic procedures create or constitute political authority (Viehoff 2014, Kolodny 2023).

Instrumentalist defenses of democracy aim to show that democratic decision-making procedures are legitimate because they are best able to produce the right outcomes. Many of those arguments for the legitimacy of democracy focus on the (instrumental) epistemic value of democratic decision-making procedures. I’ll discuss these in a moment. But, first, it’s important to note that not all do. A fact-based version of democratic instrumentalism holds that democratic decision-processes are legitimate to the extent that they, in fact, promote morally good or just outcomes. Amartya Sen’s finding that democracies prevent famines illustrates the idea (Sen 1999). Brinkmann (2019) argues that there is an indirect version of instrumentalism about political legitimacy, which ties legitimacy to justice, but that is less vulnerable to standard objections against instrumentalism. This indirect instrumentalism, he argues, can support the legitimacy of democratic procedures.

Epistemic justifications of democracy do not always target the legitimacy of democracy. Some just aim to add to our overall understanding of the justification of democracy, without claiming that the epistemic argument provided is sufficient to establish the legitimacy of democracy. Some pragmatist epistemic defences of democracy, which need not be instrumentalist, are best interpreted along those lines (e.g., Misak 2004, Talisse 2009). But to the extent that they do target legitimacy, epistemic instrumentalist defenses of democracy rely on what Estlund calls a “correctness theory of democratic legitimacy” (Estlund 2008: 99). According to this theory, democracy is necessary for legitimacy to the extent that it generates political decisions that are correct or more likely to be correct.

The best-known epistemic instrumentalist defense of democracy draws on the Condorcet jury theorem (see Goodin and Spiekermann 2019 for a comprehensive recent discussion). In its original formulation, the Condorcet jury theorem assumes that there are two alternatives and one of them is the correct outcome, however defined. Take the latter to be the legitimate outcome. The theorem says that if each voter is more likely to be correct than wrong, then a majority of all is also more likely to be correct than wrong. In addition, the probability that a majority will vote for the correct outcome increases with the size of the body of voters. Since democracy has a greater constituency than any other regime, the theorem gives an argument for why democracy is best able to generate legitimate outcomes. Bernard Grofman and Scott Feld (1988) interpret the Condorcet jury theorem as an explanation of Rousseau’s theory of how a democratic decision reflects the general will.

In addition to arguments based on the Condorcet jury theorem, there are other ways to defend the instrumental epistemic value of democracy. The main alternative to the jury theorem is a diversity-based mechanism. Hélène Landemore (2012, 2020) draws on work by Lu Hong and Scott Page (2004) to argue that by bringing together diverse perspectives, democratic decision-making can outperform decision-making by less diverse groups, e.g., groups of experts.

Cristina Lafont (2019) objects that such epistemic instrumentalist arguments misconstrue the grounds of political legitimacy, echoing objections against epistocracy (section 3.3). According to Lafont, epistemic arguments for democracy imply that citizens ought to defer once the correct decision is identified. But, Lafont argues, the unique legitimacy of democracy stems from honoring each citizen’s equal political authoritativeness and seeing each citizen as an addressee of political justification, not as a co-supplier of information for tracking a correct answer to a question. This blocks a requirement to blindly defer to others – a point she argues is lost in epistemic instrumentalist theories of democratic legitimacy.

According to pure proceduralist conceptions of democratic legitimacy, democratic decisions are legitimate as long as they are the result of an appropriately constrained process of democratic decision-making. These views place all the normative weight on the democratic procedure.

There are several ways in which pure proceduralism might be understood. On an account of aggregative democracy—which takes the aggregation of individual preferences, for example through voting, to be the key feature of democracy—pure proceduralism implies that democratic decisions are legitimate if the aggregative process is fair. Kenneth May’s defense of majority rule (May 1952) relies on a view of this sort (see also Dahl 1956).

On a deliberative account of democracy, legitimacy depends, at least in part, on the process of public deliberation (Manin 1987; Bohman 1996; Gutmann and Thompson 1996). Thomas Christiano has a good characterization of what pure proceduralism entails in an account of deliberative democracy: “democratic discussion, deliberation, and decisionmaking under certain conditions are what make the outcomes legitimate for each person. … [W]hatever the results of discussions, deliberation, and decisionmaking …, they are legitimate. The results are made legitimate by being the results of the procedure” (Christiano 1996: 35). The idea is that while democratic deliberation helps sorting through reasons for and against particular candidates or policy proposals, and perhaps even generates new alternatives, the legitimacy of the outcomes of such a process only depends on the fairness of the decision-making process, not on the quality of the outcomes it produces. The justification for conceptions of democratic legitimacy of this kind is that there is no shared standard for assessing the quality of the outcomes—deep disagreement about reasons for and against proposals will always remain. A fair way to resolve such disagreements is thus the only source of the legitimacy of the outcomes (Waldron 1996; Gaus 1997; Christiano 2008).

Estlund (2008) has raised a challenge against fairness-based versions of democratic proceduralism. He points out that other decision-making procedures—flipping a coin, for example—also satisfy a fairness requirement. An argument from fairness is thus insufficient to establish the superior legitimacy of democratic decision-making. Pure proceduralists can respond to this challenge by pointing to the distinctive fairness of democratic decision-making procedures. They can argue that the legitimacy of democratically made decisions stems from the kind of political equality realized only by democracy. According to Christiano (2008), only in a democracy are people publicly treated as equals. According to Viehoff (2014) and Kolodny (2023), only a democracy secures the kind of relational equality that avoids subordinating some citizens to the decisions of others.

Another response to Estlund’s challenge against fairness-based arguments is to focus on the kind of freedom that democracy offers, rather than on egalitarian considerations. Pettit’s equal control view, already mentioned in sections 1 and 3.3, rests on this strategy. Pettit’s republican theory defends democracy as uniquely able to secure the non-domination of the citizens. Lafont (2019) defends the legitimacy of democracy on the basis of its link to self-governance (see the discussion of her view in section 4.1).

A different proceduralist response to Estlund’s challenge is to point to the procedural epistemic values that the democratic process realizes—on how inclusive it is, for example, or how thoroughly the knowledge claims on which particular proposals rest have been subjected to criticism. The thought is that political legitimacy may be jeopardized not just by unequal access to political, social and economic institutions, but also by unjustified epistemic privilege. What Peter calls pure epistemic proceduralism is a conception of democratic legitimacy according to which political decisions are legitimate if they are the outcome of a deliberative democratic decision-making process that satisfies some conditions of political and epistemic fairness (Peter 2008).

Some conceptions of democratic legitimacy seek to reconcile instrumentalist and non-instrumentalist considerations. What we may call rational proceduralist conceptions of democratic legitimacy add conditions that refer to the quality of outcomes to those that apply to the procedural properties of democratic decision-making.

As is the case with pure proceduralist conceptions, rational proceduralist conceptions of democratic legitimacy also vary with the underlying account of democracy. A version of rational proceduralism is implicit in Arrow’s approach to aggregative democracy (Arrow 1963; see Peter 2008 for a discussion). The problem he poses is: are there methods of democratic decision-making that are based on equal consideration of individual interests and are conducive to rational social choice? As is well known, his impossibility theorem shows a problem with finding such decision-making mechanisms. Arrow’s way of posing the problem—which contrasts with May’s (1952)—suggests that the possible irrationality of majority rule undermines its legitimacy, even if it respects certain procedural values. His view implies that democratic legitimacy only obtains if the outcomes themselves satisfy certain quality conditions—specifically, he postulated that they should satisfy certain rationality axioms.

The default conception of democratic legitimacy that many deliberative democrats favor is also a version of rational proceduralism. Habermas’ conception of democratic legitimacy is an example. Drawing on discourse ethics, Habermas (1990; 1996) argues that people’s participation in the justificatory processes of deliberative democracy is necessary for political legitimacy. According to him, “the procedures and communicative presuppositions of democratic opinion- and will-formation function as the most important sluices for the discursive rationalization of the decisions of an administration bound by law and statute” (1996: 300). The legitimacy of democratic decisions, then, depends on both procedural values and on the substantive quality of the outcomes that these deliberative decision-making procedures generate. As Habermas puts it: “Deliberative politics acquires its legitimating force from the discursive structure of an opinion- and will-formation that can fulfill its socially integrative function only because citizens expect its results to have a reasonable quality ” (Habermas 1996: 304; see also Benhabib 1994; Knight and Johnson 1994; Cohen 1997a,b; Bohman 1997). In his view, only deliberative democratic decision-making can produce a decision everyone has reasons to endorse.

Estlund objects to both pure proceduralist and the versions of rational proceduralism just discussed that they unduly neglect epistemic considerations. But he also objects to epistemic instrumentalist accounts that they fail to give a sufficient explanation for why those who disagree with the outcome of the democratic decision-making process ought to treat it as binding. To correct for that, Estlund’s alternative conception of democratic legitimacy puts more emphasis on procedures while still giving weight to epistemic considerations. The conception of legitimacy that he advocates “requires that the procedure can be held, in terms acceptable to all qualified points of view, to be epistemically the best (or close to it) among those that are better than random” (Estlund 2008: 98). By privileging what he calls the “qualified acceptability requirement” (2008: 40ff) over epistemic considerations, Estlund avoids the worry about political deference that drives Lafont’s (2019) rejection of epistemic theories of democratic legitimacy.

As we saw, worries about political deference are an important source for scepticism about both epistocratic and epistemic democracy theories of legitimacy (see also van Wietmarschen 2019, Lillehammer 2021, and Brinkmann 2022 on political deference). Peter (2023), by contrast, argues that these principled worries about political deference are overstated and that legitimate political decision-making may be compatible with a requirement to politically defer, even in a system that is overall democratic.

5. Legitimacy and Political Cosmopolitanism

Political cosmopolitanism about political legitimacy is the view that national communities are not the exclusive source of political legitimacy in the global realm. This is a minimal characterization. It is compatible with a system in which nation states and their governments remain the main political agents, as long as there is some attribution of legitimate political authority to international conventions. For even if states and their governments are the main political entities, there is still the question about appropriate relations among national actors. When should nation states recognize another political entity as legitimate? And what are appropriate sanctions against entities that do not meet the legitimacy criteria? Call this the problem of international legitimacy.

Political cosmopolitanism is also compatible with the much more demanding idea of replacing nation states and national governments—at least in certain policy areas—by global institutions. Examples of relevant policy areas are trade or the environment. The associated global institutions may include both global rules (e.g., the rules of the WTO treaty) and global political agents (e.g., the UN General Assembly). This raises the question of what conditions such global governance institutions have to satisfy in order to qualify as legitimate. Call this the problem of global legitimacy.

The more familiar, contrasting position is political nationalism. It is the view that only the political institutions of nation states pose and can overcome the legitimacy problem and hence be a source of political legitimacy. Political nationalism is usually defended on the grounds that there is something unique either about the coercion deployed by states or about the political authority which states possess which needs justification (see Stilz 2019 and Sadurski, Sevel, and Walton 2019 for recent explorations of these issues).

Political nationalism has had much influence on debates on global justice. Some have argued that because moral cosmopolitan commitments trump commitments to (national) legitimacy, a conception of global justice can be detached from concerns with legitimacy (Beitz 1979a,b, 1998; Pogge 2008). Others have argued—again assuming political nationalism—that legitimate authority at the level of the nation state is necessary to pursue moral cosmopolitan goals (Ypi 2008 provides an empirical argument). Yet others have argued against the idea of global justice altogether, on the grounds that political legitimacy ties obligations of justice to nation states (Blake 2001; Nagel 2005). What these approaches to global justice have failed to address is the possibility of sound political cosmopolitan conceptions of political legitimacy. Nicole Hassoun (2012) takes this issue as her starting-point. She argues that the coercive power of global governance institutions raises a legitimacy problem of its own and, turning the arguments of Michael Blake (2001) and Thomas Nagel (2005) on their heads, that securing the legitimacy of those institutions entails obligations of global justice. (See also Aytac 2022 on this, who approaches the issue from political realist perspective.)

There are two main approaches to both international and global legitimacy: the state-centered approach and the people-centered approach. The former takes appropriate relations among states as basic. As Charles Beitz characterizes this approach: “international society is understood as domestic society writ large, with states playing the roles occupied by persons in domestic society. States, not persons, are the subjects of international morality, and the rules that regulate their behavior are supposed to preserve a peaceful order of sovereign states” (1979b: 408; see also Beitz 1998). Locke, Bentham, and Mill, among others, approached the issue of international legitimacy in this way. Among contemporary thinkers, Michael Walzer (1977, 1980) defends a state-based—or as he calls it—community-based approach. The most important criterion of international legitimacy that he proposes is the criterion of non-interference. (For discussions of Walzer’s proposal, see Beitz 1979a, b). Others have put forward conceptions based on state consent. Rawls advocates a conception based on the consent of “well-ordered” (either “liberal” or “decent”) peoples (Rawls 1999; for critical discussions, see e.g., Buchanan 2000; Wenar 2002; Cavallero 2003).

The second approach takes features of individuals—their interests or their rights—as basic for legitimacy. At present, the most comprehensive contemporary philosophical treatment of international legitimacy of this kind is probably Allen Buchanan’s Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination (2003). As mentioned above (section 2.2.), Buchanan advocates a moralized conception of legitimacy, according to which entities are legitimate if they are morally justified to wield political power. Specifically, political legitimacy requires that a minimal standard of justice is met.

On the basis of this moralized conception of legitimacy, Buchanan argues against the state-based conception and against state consent theories of legitimacy in particular. State consent, Buchanan claims, is neither necessary nor sufficient for legitimacy. It is not sufficient because it is well-known that states tend to be the worst perpetrators in matters of human rights and there is thus need for an independent international standard of minimal justice to obtain legitimacy. It is not necessary, because international law recognizes many obligations as binding even without the consent of acting governments. As long as these obligations are compatible with the minimal standard of justice, they are legitimate even if they have arisen without state consent.

Buchanan also rejects the idea that the source of a legitimacy deficit at the international level is the inequality among states. He does not believe that states need to have equal weight in international institutions. What he regards as the main problem of legitimacy at the international level is, instead, that “a technocratic elite, lacking in democratic accountability to individuals and nonstate groups, is playing an increasingly powerful role in a system of regional and global governance” (2003: 289). The more efficient remedy for this problem, he argues, is protecting basic human rights and improving democratic accountability.

Buchanan uses his conception of legitimacy to answer the question when a political entity—as formed, for example, by secession or by union—should be recognized as legitimate. He lists three criteria (Buchanan 2003: 266ff). The first is a “minimal internal justice requirement”. It specifies how political entities should treat those upon whom it wields political power. Specifically, it requires that basic human rights are protected. This requirement includes a demand for minimal democracy. But not all political entities that satisfy this requirement deserve to be recognized as legitimate. They also need to be formed in the right way. The second criterion is thus a criterion of procedural justice and requires that a political entity has not come about through usurpation (“nonusurpation requirement”). Finally, there is a “minimal external justice requirement”. It contains conditions about how political entities should interact with one another.

Sofia Näsström (2007) uses the people-centered approach to push against the tendency to associate state legitimacy with the legitimacy of governments. The more fundamental question, she argues, is what makes the constitution of a people legitimate. And it would be a mistake to think that the constitution of a people is a historical issue or an empirical given. What makes the constitution of a people legitimate is a normative question in its own right that must be asked before we can ask about the legitimacy of the government of a people.

The question Näsström articulates, which is also discussed in the literature on the constitution of the demos (Goodin 2007), is important for the debate on the ethics of immigration. What is the scope for legitimate border controls? Do states have a unilateral right to control their borders or do potential immigrants have a right to participate in the determination of immigration policies? Abizadeh (2008) has argued, on the basis of the claim that the constitution of the demos is not a historical given, that a commitment to a democratic theory of domestic political legitimacy implies that one ought to reject the unilateral domestic right to control and close the state’s boundaries. His key claim is that state borders are coercive to potential immigrants. In light of this, and because, in a democracy, the exercise of coercive political power requires some form of democratic justification, he concludes that both citizens and foreigners should have say in the determination of border policies. (See Miller 2008 for a critical discussion of this argument.)

Conceptions of global legitimacy broaden the scope of legitimate authority to global governance institutions. One of the precursors of global legitimacy is Kant. Kant is often read as advocating a conception of international legitimacy based on a loose “league of nations”—especially in Perpetual Peace . But Sharon Byrd and Joachim Hruschka (2008) argue that Kant, especially in The Doctrine of Right , can also be read as favoring, a “state of nation states” as the right approach to global legitimacy. This conception, while stopping short of requiring a single world state, confers more coercive political power to the global level than the league of nations, which essentially leaves untouched the sovereignty of nation states.

The philosophical literature on global legitimacy is very much work in progress. But most proposals favor a multilevel system of governance in which global legitimacy is to be achieved through an appropriate division of labor between nation states and issue-specific global governance institutions (e.g., Caney 2006; Valentini 2012).

Any successful theory of global legitimacy has to cover the following three issues. First, what are global governance institutions and in what ways can and should they be thought of as taking over roles from states or their governments? This is a question about the subject of global legitimacy (Hurrell and MacDonald 2012). Second, what is the legitimacy problem that such governance institutions face? And, third, how can they solve this problem of legitimacy and what are legitimacy criteria that apply to them? How, if at all, do these criteria differ from those that apply at the level of nation states?

In response to the first question, Buchanan and Keohane (2006) argue that global governance institutions such as the WTO or the IMF “are like governments in that they issue rules and publicly attach significant consequences to compliance or failure to comply with them—and claim authority to do so” (Buchanan and Keohane 2006: 406). These institutions are set up to handle certain issues in similar fashion as national political agencies would. Just like national political institutions, they are coordination devices. Only they are created to solve problems that arise at the global level.

Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel (2005) have a slightly broader account of global governance institutions—one that is not limited to them being coordination devices, but that emphasizes coercion instead. According to Cohen and Sabel 2005: 765), “[t]o a substantial and growing extent … rulemaking directly affecting the freedom of action of individuals, firms, and nation states (and the making of rules to regulate this rulemaking) is taking place … in global settings created by the world’s nations but no longer under their effective control.” In their answer to the second question, they relate the legitimacy problem of global governance institutions to the absence of political authority, understood as legitimate exercises of coercive political power, at the global level. To overcome this problem, they argue, new modes of governance must be created, with their own structures of accountability. These structures are necessary to properly deal with the coercive power that these institutions exercise.

Buchanan and Keohane agree that the attempt to rule without legitimacy is an unjustified exercise of power. They also argue that the attempt to rule without legitimacy raises not only a normative problem, but has direct practical consequences, as institutions that appear unjustified will not be effective. The problem of legitimacy that global governance institutions face is that even when there is widespread agreement that global institutions that can take on the role of co-ordination devices are necessary, there will be widespread disagreement about which particular institutions are necessary and what rules they should issue (Buchanan and Keohane 2006: 408ff).

In answer to the third question, Buchanan and Keohane (2006) propose a moralized conception of legitimacy: legitimacy “is the right to rule, understood to mean both that institutional agents are morally justified in making rules and attempting to secure compliance with them and that people subject to those rules have moral, content-independent reasons to follow them and/or to not interfere with others’ compliance with them” (2006: 411). Substantively, they propose that an institution is morally justified in this way if it does not contribute to grave injustices (“minimal moral acceptability”), if there is no obvious alternative that would perform better (“comparative benefit”), and if it respects its own guidelines and procedures (“institutional integrity”) (Buchanan and Keohane 2006: 419ff).

An important question for political cosmopolitanism is to what extent international and global legitimacy require democracy—either at the level of national states and governments or at the level of global governance institutions. Many writers on the subject have tended to take a cautiously positive stance on this issue (e.g., Beitz 1979b, 1998; Held 1995, 2002; Buchanan 2003; Buchanan and Keohane 2006). An exception is Rawls in The Law of Peoples , however, who advocates a conception of international legitimacy that demands that peoples and their states are well-ordered, but does not associate well-orderedness with democracy.

There are two worries that tend to underlie the cautious attitude. One is feasibility: it is often argued that democracy at the international level, let alone at the level of global governance institutions, is utopian and cannot be realized. The second worry is of a moral nature: democracy should not be imposed on people and peoples who endorse a different set of values (see Valentini 2014 for a discussion).

In response to the second worry, Christiano (2015) argues that a human right to democracy is compatible with a right to self-determination and that, properly understood, the right to self-determination presupposes the human right to democracy. Christiano’s work offers the most comprehensive defense of a human right to democracy at the domestic level (Christiano 2011; 2015). Christiano’s instrumental argument aims to show that democracies offer better protection of a range of human rights than non-democracies. His intrinsic argument for a human right to democracy builds on an argument discussed earlier (section 4.2), namely that democracies are uniquely able to realize the value of publicly treating people as equals.

Cohen and Sabel (2005) seek to rescue an ideal of global democracy from more skeptical tendencies in the literature. They respond to these considerations by advocating a notion of global democracy that emphasizes the deliberative aspect. Granting to skeptics that democratic decision-making mechanisms might be problematic for both feasibility reasons and moral reasons, they argue that some form of deliberation is primarily what is needed to address the legitimacy deficit that global governance institutions face (see also Appiah 2007; List and Koenig-Archibugi 2010).

• Abizadeh, Arash, 2008. “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders,” Political Theory , 36(1): 37–65.
• Anscombe, G.E.M., 1981. “One the Source of Authority of the State,” Ethics, Religion, and Politics (Collected Philosophical Papers: Volume 3), Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 130–155.
• Appiah, Anthony, 2007. Cosmopolitanism , London: Penguin.
• Applbaum, Arthur, 2019. Legitimacy: The Right to Rule in a Wanton World , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Arendt, Hannah, 1992. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Arneson, Richard, 2003. “Defending the Purely Instrumental Account of Democratic Legitimacy,” Journal of Political Philosophy , 11(1): 122–132.
• Arrow, Kenneth, 1963. Social Choice and Individual Values , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Aytac, Ugur, 2022. “Global Political Legitimacy and the Structural Power of Capital,” Journal of Social Philosophy , first online 11 March 2022. doi:10.1111/josp.12464
• Baderin, Alice, 2014. “Two Forms of Realism in Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory , 13(2): 132–153.
• Barnard, Frederick M., 2001. Democratic Legitimacy: Plural Values and Political Power , Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
• Beetham, David, 1991. The Legitimation of Power , Basingstoke: Palgrave.
• Beitz, Charles, 1979a. Political Theory and International Relations , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1979b. “Bounded Morality: Justice and the State in World Politics,” International Organization , 33: 405–424.
• –––, 1998. “International Relations, Philosophy of,” in Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy , London: Routledge, pp.455–456.
• Benhabib, Seyla, 1994. “Deliberative Rationality and Models of Democratic Legitimacy,” Constellations , 1(1): 25–53.
• Bentham, Jeremy, 1987 [1843]. “Anarchical Fallacies,” in Waldron, Jeremy (ed.), Nonsense upon Stilts , London: Taylor and Francis, pp. 46–69.
• Binmore, Ken, 2000. “A Utilitarian Theory of Legitimacy,” in Economics, Values, and Organization , Ben-Ner, Avner and Louis G. Putterman (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 101–132.
• Blake, Michael, 2001. “Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 30(3): 257–296.
• Bohman, James, 1996. Public Deliberation , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, 1997. “Deliberative Democracy and Effective Social Freedom: Capabilites, Resources, and Opportunities,” in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics , James Bohman and William Rehg (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 321–348.
• Brennan, Jason, 2016. Against Democracy , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Brink, David, 1992. “Mill’s Deliberative Utilitarianism,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 21(1): 67–103.
• Brinkmann, Matthias, 2019. “Indirect Instrumentalism about Political Legitimacy,” Moral Philosophy and Politics , 6(1): 175–202.
• –––, 2022. “In Defence of Non-Ideal Political Deference,” Episteme , 19(2): 264–285.
• Buchanan, Allen, 2000. “Rawls’s Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World,” Ethics , 110(4): 697–721.
• –––, 2002. “Political Legitimacy and Democracy,” Ethics , 112(4): 689–719.
• –––, 2003. Justice, Legitimacy and Self-Determination , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Buchanan, Allen and Robert O. Keohane, 2006. “The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions,” Ethics and International Affairs , 20(4): 405–437.
• Burelli, Carlo and Chiara Destri, 2022. “The Sources of Political Normativity: the Case for Instrumental and Epistemic Normativity in Political Realism,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice , 25(3): 397–413.
• Byrd, B. Sharon and Joachim Hruschka, 2008. “From the State of Nature to the Juridical State of States,” Law and Philosophy , 27: 599–641.
• Caney, Simon, 2006. “Cosmopolitan Justice and Institutional Design: An Egalitarian Liberal Conception of Global Governance,” Social Theory and Practice , 32(4): 725–756.
• Cavallero, Eric, 2003. “Popular Sovereignty and the Law of Peoples,” Legal Theory , 9(3):181–200.
• Chan, Joseph, 2013. Confucian Perfectionism , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Christiano, Thomas, 1996. The Rule of the Many , Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• –––, 2004. “The Authority of Democracy,” The Journal of Political Philosophy , 12(3): 266–90.
• –––, 2008. The Constitution of Equality , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2011. “An Instrumental Argument for a Human Right to Democracy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 39(2): 142–176.
• –––, 2015. “Self Determination and the Human Right to Democracy,” in Cruft, Rowan, S. Matthew Liao, and Massimo Renzo (eds.) Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 459–480.
• Cohen, Joshua, 1997a. “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Deliberative Democracy , James Bohman and William Rehg (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 67–91.
• –––, 1997b. “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” in Deliberative Democracy , James Bohman and William Rehg (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 407–437; reprinted from Democracy and Difference , Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 95–119.
• Cohen, Joshua and Charles Sabel, 2005. “Global Democracy?” New York University Journal of International Law and Politics , 37(4): 763–797.
• Dahl, Robert A., 1956. A Preface to Democratic Theory , Chicago: Chicago University Press.
• Darwall, Stephen, 2010. “Authority and Reasons: Exclusionary and Second-Personal,” Ethics , 120: 257–278.
• Dworkin, Ronald, 1986. Law’s Empire , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Edmundson, William A., 1998. Three Anarchical Fallacies , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Enoch, David, 2015. “Against Public Reason,” in David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne, and Steven Wall (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 112–142.
• Estlund, David, 2003. “Why Not Epistocracy?”, in Desire, Identity, and Existence: Essays in Honor of T.M. Penner , Naomi Reshotko (ed.), Kelowna, BC: Academic Printing and Publishing, pp. 53–69.
• –––, 2008. Democratic Authority , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Flikschuh, Katrin, 2008. “Reason, Right, and Revolution: Kant and Locke,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 36(4): 375–404.
• Gaus, Gerald F., 1997. “Reason, Justification, and Consensus: Why Democracy Can’t Have It All,” in Deliberative Democracy , Bohman, James and William Rehg (eds.), Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 205–242.
• –––, 2011. The Order of Public Reason , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Goodin, Robert, 2007. “Enfranchising all Affected Interests, and its Alternatives,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 35(1): 40–68.
• Goodin, Robert and Kai Spiekermann, 2019. The Epistemology of Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Green, Leslie, 1988. The Authority of the State , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Greene, Amanda, 2016. “Consent and Political Legitimacy,” in David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne, and Steven Wall (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 71–97.
• –––, 2017. “Legitimacy without Liberalism: A Defense of Max Weber’s Standard of Political Legitimacy,” Analyse & Kritik , 39(2): 295–324.
• Grofman, Bernard and Scott L. Feld, 1988. “Rousseau’s General Will: A Condorcetian Perspective,” The American Political Science Review , 82(2): 567–76.
• Gutmann, Amy and Dennis Thompson, 1996. Democracy and Disagreement , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Habermas, Jürgen, 1979. Communication and the Evolution of Society , transl. by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.
• –––, 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action , transl. by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, 1996. Between Facts and Norms , Transl. by William Rehg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Hampton, Jean, 1998. Political Philosophy , Boulder: Westview Press.
• Hartley, Christie and Lori Watson, 2018. Equal Citizenship and Public Reason , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Hassoun, Nicole, 2012. Globalization and Global Justice , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Held, David, 1995. Democracy and the Global Order , Paolo Alto: Stanford University Press.
• –––, 2002. “Law of States, Law of Peoples: Three Models of Sovereignty,” Legal Theory 8(1):1–44.
• Hershovitz, Scott, 2003. “Legitimacy, Democracy, and Razian Authority,” Legal Theory , 9: 201–220.
• –––, 2011. “The Role of Authority,” Philosopher’s Imprint , 11(7): 1–19.
• Hobbes, Thomas, 1668. Leviathan , edited by Edwin Curley, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.
• Hong, Lu, and Scott E. Page, 2004. “Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Outperform Groups of High-ability Problem Solvers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , 101(46): 16385–16389.
• Honig, Bonnie, 1993. Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Horton, John, 2010. “Realism, liberal moralism and a political theory of modus vivendi,” European Journal of Political Theory , 9(4): 431–448.
• –––, 2012. “Political Legitimacy, Justice and Consent,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy , 15(2): 129–148.
• Hume, David, 1748. “Of the Original Contract,” in Hume’s Ethical Writings , Alasdair MacIntyre (ed.), Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965, 255–274.
• Hurrell, Andrew and Terry Macdonald, 2012. “Global Public Power: The Subject of Principles of Global Political Legitimacy,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy , 15(5): 553–571.
• Jiang, Tao, 2021. Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Jubb, Robert, 2019. “On What a Distinctively Political Normativity Is,” Political Studies Review , 17(4): 360–369.
• Kant, Immanuel, 1999. Practical Philosophy , Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation, edited by Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Klosko, George, 2004. The Principle of Fairness and Political Obligation , 2nd edition, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Knight, Jack and James Johnson, 1994. “Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of Democratic Legitimacy,” Political Theory , 22: 277–296.
• Kolodny, Niko, 2023. The Pecking Order , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Korsgaard, Christine, 1997. The Sources of Normativity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Lafont, Cristina, 2019. Democracy Without Shortcuts , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Langvatn, Silje, 2016. “Legitimate, But Unjust; Just, But Illegitimate: Rawls on Political Legitimacy,” Philosophy & Social Criticism , 42(2): 132–153.
• Landemore, Hélène, 2012. Democratic Reason , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Landemore, Hélène, 2020. Open Democracy , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Leader Maynard, Jonathan and Alex Worsnip, 2018. “Is There a Distinctively Political Normativity?,” Ethics , 128(4): 756–787.
• Lillehammer, Hallvard, 2021. “Testimony, Deference, and Value,” in Michael Hannon and Jeroen de Ridder (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology , New York: Taylor and Francis, pp. 458–468.
• List Christian and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, 2010. “Can There Be a Global Demos? An Agency-based Approach,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 38(1): 76–110.
• Locke, John, 1690. Second Treatise on Civil Government , edited by C. B. MacPherson, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980.
• Manin, Bernard, 1987. “On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation,” Political Theory , 15: 338–368.
• May, Kenneth O., 1952. “A Set of Independent, Necessary, and Sufficient Conditions for Simple Majority Decision,” Econometrica , 20(4): 680–84.
• Michelman, Frank, 2022. Constitutional Essentials , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Mill, John. Stuart, 1998. On Liberty and Other Essays , edited by John Gray, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Miller, David, 2008. “Why Immigration Controls Are Not Coercive: A Reply to Arash Abizadeh,” Political Theory , 38(1): 111–120.
• Misak, Cheryl, 2004. “Making Disagreement Matter: Pragmatism and Deliberative Democracy,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy , 18: 9–22.
• Mittiga, Ross, 2022. “Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change,” American Political Science Review , 116(3): 998–1011.
• Mommsen, Wolfgang, 1989. The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Nagel, Thomas, 1987. “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 16(3): 215–240.
• –––, 2005. “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 33(2): 113–147.
• Näsström, Sofia, 2007. “The Legitimacy of the People,” Political Theory , 35(5): 624–658.
• Nozick, Robert, 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Nussbaum, Martha, 2011. “Perfectionist Liberalism and Political Liberalism,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 39(1): 3–45.
• Pateman, Carol, 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Pateman, Carol, 1988. The Sexual Contract , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Perry, Stephen, 2013. “Political Authority and Political Obligation,” in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law: Volume 2 , Leslie Green and Brian Leiter (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–74.
• Peter, Fabienne, 2008. Democratic Legitimacy , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2023. The Grounds of Political Legitimacy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Pettit, Philip, 2012. On the People’s Terms , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Pitkin, Hannah, 1965. “Obligation and Consent I,” American Political Science Review , 59: 991–999.
• Plato, The Republic , translated by Desmond Lee, introduction by Melissa Lane, London: Penguin, 2007.
• Pogge, Thomas, 2008. World Poverty and Human Rights , 2 nd edition, Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Puryear, Stephen, 2021. “Consent by Residence: A Defense,” European Journal of Political Theory , 20(3): 529–546.
• Quong, Jonathan, 2011. Liberalism without Perfection , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Rawls, John, 1971. A Theory of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1993. Political Liberalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 1995. “Reply to Habermas,” The Journal of Philosophy , 92(3): 132–180.
• –––, 1999. The Law of Peoples , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2007. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Raz, Joseph, 1986. The Morality of Freedom , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1995. Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• –––, 2006. “The Problem of Authority: Revisiting the Service Conception,” Minnesota Law Review , 90: 1003–1044. [ Available at SSRN ]
• –––, 2010. “On Respect, Authority, and Neutrality: A Response,” Ethics , 120(2): 279–301.
• Riley, Patrick, 1982. Will and Political Legitimacy , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Ripstein, Arthur, 2004. “Authority and Coercion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 32(1): 2–35.
• Rossi, Enzo, 2012. “Justice, Legitimacy and (Normative) Authority for Political Realists,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy , 15(2): 149–164.
• Rossi, Enzo and Matt Sleat, 2014.“Realism in Normative Political Theory,” Philosophy Compass , 9(10): 689–701.
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1988 [1762]. On the Social Contract , Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Sadurski, Wojciech, Michael Sevel and Kevin Walton (eds.), 2019. Legitimacy: The State and Beyond , Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
• Schneewind, J. B., 1998. The Invention of Autonomy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Sen, Amartya, 1999. Development as Freedom , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Shelby, Tommie, 2007. “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto,” Philosophy & Public Affairs , 35(2): 126–160.
• Simmons, A. John, 1976. “Tacit Consent and Political Obligation,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 5(3): 274–291.
• –––, 2001. Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Sleat, Matt, 2014. “Legitimacy in Realist Thought: Between Moralism and Realpolitik,” Political Theory , 42(3): 314–337
• Stark, Cynthia A, 2000. “Hypothetical Consent and Justification.” The Journal of Philosophy , 97(6): 313–334.
• Stears, Matt, 2007. “The Liberal Tradition and the Politics of Exclusion”, Annual Review of Political Science , 10(1): 85–101.
• Stilz, Anna. 2009. Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2019. Territorial Sovereignty , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Talisse, Robert, 2009. Democracy and Moral Conflict , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Ten, C. L., 1998. “Democracy, Socialism, and the Working Class,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mill , John Skorupski (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 372–395.
• Tuck, Richard, 1993. Philosophy and Government 1572–1651, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Turner, Piers Norris, 2014. “‘Harm’ and Mill’s Harm Principle,” Ethics , 124(2): 299–326.
• Valentini, Laura, 2012. “Assessing the Global Order: Justice, Legitimacy, or Political Justice?,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy , 15(5): 593–612.
• –––, 2014. “No Global Demos, No Global Democracy? A Systematization and Critique,” Perspectives on Politics , 12(4): 789–807.
• Vallier, Kevin, 2011. “Convergence and Consensus in Public Reason,” Public Affairs Quarterly , 25(4): 261–279.
• Vallier, Kevin and Ryan Muldoon, 2021. “In Public Reason, Diversity Trumps Coherence,” Journal of Political Philosophy , 29(2): 211–230.
• Van Wietmarschen, Han, 2019. “Political Testimony,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics , 18(1): 23–45.
• Viehoff, Daniel, 2014. “Democratic Equality and Political Authority,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 42(4): 337–375.
• Waldron, Jeremy, 1987. “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism,” The Philosophical Quarterly , 37(147): 127–150.
• –––, 1999. Law and Disagreement , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Wall, Steven, 2007. “Democracy and Equality,” Philosophical Quarterly , 57(228): 416–438.
• Walzer, Michael, 1977. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations , New York: Basic Books.
• –––, 1980. “The Moral Standing of States: A Response to Four Critics,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 9(3): 209–229.
• Weber, Max, 2009 [1918]. “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology , H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), New York: Routledge, 77–128.
• –––, 1964. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization , Talcott Parsons (ed.), New York: Free Press.
• Wellman, Christopher, 1996. “Liberalism, Samaritanism, and Political Legitimacy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 25(3): 211–237.
• Wenar, Leif, 2002. “The Legitimacy of Peoples,” in Pablo De Greiff and Ciaran Cronin (eds.), Global Justice and Transnational Politics , Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 53–76.
• Williams, Bernard, 2005. In the Beginning was the Deed , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Wolff, Robert Paul, 1970. In Defense of Anarchism , New York, Harper & Row.
• Ypi, Lea L., 2008. “Statist Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy , 16(1): 48–71.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

Arendt, Hannah | authority | coercion | democracy | feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy | Habermas, Jürgen | Hobbes, Thomas: moral and political philosophy | justification, political: public | Kant, Immanuel: social and political philosophy | legal obligation and authority | Locke, John: political philosophy | perfectionism, in moral and political philosophy | political obligation | public reason | Rawls, John | social contract: contemporary approaches to | sovereignty

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Thomas Pogge and Laura Valentini for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Copyright © 2023 by Fabienne Peter < f . peter @ warwick . ac . uk >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

13.1 Contemporary Government Regimes: Power, Legitimacy, and Authority

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe the nature of governing regimes.
• Define power, authority, and legitimacy.
• Explain the relationships among power, authority, and legitimacy.
• Discuss political history and contemporary political and legal developments surrounding governing regimes.

A government can be defined as a set of organizations, with their associated rules and procedures, that has the authority to exercise the widest scope of power —the ability to impose its will on others to secure desired outcomes—over a defined area. Government authority includes the power to have the final say over when the use of force is acceptable, and governments seek to exercise their authority with legitimacy. This is a complex definition, so this section unpacks its elements one by one.

A government both claims the right and has the ability to exercise power over all people in a defined geographic area. The leadership of a church or a mosque, for example, can refuse to offer religious services to certain individuals or can excommunicate them. However, such organizations have no right to apply force to impose their will on non-congregants. In contrast, governments reserve for themselves the broadest scope of rightful power within their area of control and can, in principle, impose their will on vast areas of the lives of all people within the territories over which they rule. During the COVID-19 pandemic, only governments both claimed and exercised the right to close businesses and to forbid religious institutions to hold services. The pandemic also highlights another feature of governments: almost all governments seek to have and to exercise power in order to create at least minimal levels of peace, order, and collective stability and safety.

As German social scientist Max Weber maintained, almost all governments seek to have and to enforce the right to have the final say over when violence is acceptable within their territory. Governments often assert what Weber called a monopoly on the right to use violence , reserving for themselves either the right to use violence or the right to approve its use by others. 1 The word monopoly might be misleading. In most countries, citizens have a right to use violence in self-defense; most governments do not maintain that they alone can exercise the acceptable use of violence. Where the government recognizes the right to use violence in self-defense, it will seek to reserve for itself the right to decide when, in its judgment, that use is acceptable.

Imagine a landlord confronting a tenant who has not paid their rent. The landlord cannot violently seize the renter and forcibly evict them from the apartment; only the police—an agency of the state—can acceptably do that. Nevertheless, the law of many countries recognizes a right of self-defense by means of physical violence. In many US states, for example, if a person enters your house unlawfully with a weapon and you suspect they constitute a threat to you or your family, you have a broad right to use force against that intruder in self-defense (a principle that forms the core of the “ castle doctrine ”). In addition, private security guards can sometimes use force to protect private property. The government retains the right to determine, via its court system, whether these uses of force meet the criteria for being judged acceptable. Because the government sets these criteria, it can be said to have the final say on when the use of force is permissible.

Authority is the permission, conferred by the laws of a governing regime, to exercise power. Governments most often seek to authorize their power in the form of some decree or set of decrees—most often in the form of a legal constitution that sets out the scope of the government’s powers and the process by which laws will be made and enforced. The enactment of codes of criminal law, the creation of police forces, and the establishment of procedures surrounding criminal justice are clear examples of the development of authorized power. To some degree, the constitution of every government authorizes the government to impose a prohibition, applicable in principle to all people in its territory, on certain behaviors. Individuals engaging in those behaviors are subject to coercive enforcement by the state’s police force, which adheres to defined lines of authority and the rules police departments must follow.

Governmental regulations are another type of authorized government power. The laws that structure a regime usually give the government the authority to regulate individual and group behaviors. For example, Article 1 Section 8 of the US Constitution authorizes the federal government to regulate interstate commerce. When large commercial airlines fly individuals across state lines for a fee, they engage in interstate commerce. The federal government therefore has the authority to regulate airline safety requirements and flight patterns. Pursuant to this authority, the federal government has established an agency, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), to issue these regulations, which are ultimately backed by the state’s coercive enforcement power.

Weber argued that those who structure regimes are likely to choose, on the basis of the regime’s own best interests, to create authority that is clearly spelled out in a regime’s constitutional law. 2 When lines of authority in the government are clear, especially in the context of the state’s criminal law, the people living in a regime are less fearful of the state. This helps the state secure the people’s support. When the scope of the government’s authority is clear, people can understand how their government is structured and functions and are therefore less likely to be surprised by governmental actions. This can be especially important for the economy. To follow the example above, if laws regulating the private ownership of commercial airlines are constantly open to unexpected change, some people may be wary of working in the industry or investing their money in these companies’ stock. Predictable governmental action can encourage these investments. With increased economic activity, the government can tax the productive output, amassing resources to help it achieve whatever its goals might be. In addition, clearly defined structures of authority in the form of stable bureaucratic institutions allow a government to exercise power more efficiently and cost-effectively, once again enabling it to amass more resources to serve its objectives. 3

The use of physical force to directly restrain behavior is just one of the ways governments exercise power. Governments also tax. In a sense, the taxing authority of government is a necessary corollary of its authority to impose behavior-restricting rules: almost all governments must derive revenue through taxes in order to finance the maintenance of their laws and to ensure peace and public order. However, that authority also allows governments to exercise power to achieve a wide variety of ends, funding everything from foreign wars to a social safety net or a set of social programs. Taxation is another way governments regulate people’s behavior: if you don’t pay your taxes, the government is authorized to punish you—a principle true across the world, even if the levels of enforcement for not paying taxes vary across regimes.

The authority to tax illustrates another aspect of governmental power: the use of authority to shape society by creating incentives for particular kinds of behavior. In the United States, the federal tax code enables taxpayers to deduct large charitable donations from their taxable income as a way to encourage individuals to give to charities. Additionally, homeowners can deduct the interest they pay on their home mortgage, thereby reducing their annual federal tax obligation. This use of government power is meant to encourage people to own homes rather than rent. In the United States, at least, the federal government has encouraged homeownership due to a belief that homeownership helps people build closer ties with and involvement in local communities and thus increases civic participation, and that owning a home correlates with greater levels of long-term savings, which can provide individuals greater financial security in their retirement. 4 (For some people, their house is their largest asset, which can help to finance their retirement.) Conversely, governments can impose “sin taxes”—that is, taxes on products like alcohol and cigarettes, discouraging their use. Some lawmakers have proposed levying higher taxes on bullets to discourage gun violence, and some areas have taxed sugary soft drinks to discourage their consumption as a way to improve public health. 5

Show Me the Data

Beyond taxation, governmental leaders can use their office to influence public opinion. Governmental authorities are often authorized to use the government’s assets to promote their policies: the president of the United States, for example, is authorized to use Air Force One (the presidential jet) to travel the country in order to promote policy proposals. (Presidents are not, however, allowed to use Air Force One for free to conduct political fundraising.) Additionally, members of the United States Congress are authorized to send letters to constituents, free of charge, describing or defending the policies they support. Tools like these allow governments to exercise the power of influence and persuasion. The chief executive is usually the governmental official who takes the greatest advantage of this form of power. In the United States, presidents such as Teddy Roosevelt became famous for skillfully using the “ bully pulpit ,” that is, the power of the president to shape the opinions of the population and, through this, potentially to influence members of other branches of the government, especially elected legislators.

Presidents and prime ministers often give speeches or issue proclamations to exert this power. President Barack Obama, for example, following a long tradition in American politics, spoke often of what “we as Americans” value as a way to persuade the populace to support the policy agenda of his administration. Take the following example from one of Obama’s speeches. In the speech, he defended his administration’s decision to change the priorities of federal immigration officials to less rigorously enforce laws requiring the deportation of undocumented individuals when those individuals entered the country as children—the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. Arguing that children brought to the country by their parents should not have to live in fear of deportation, Obama remarked:

“My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too. And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal—that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.” (emphasis added) 6

By using rhetoric that attempts to define the national ethos, governments can seek to exercise power by shaping the population’s sense of itself and its place in history.

Most governments establish authority not only to exercise power, but also in the pursuit of legitimacy. Legitimacy can be seen from two different vantage points. Following Weber, the term is often used to mean the widespread belief that the government has the right to exercise its power. In this sense—which can be called broad legitimacy —the concept describes a government trait. Legitimacy can also be seen from the perspective of individuals or groups who make determinations about whether their government is or is not legitimate—that is, rightfully exercising power, or what can be called judgments about legitimacy . In either sense, legitimacy is measured in perceptions of the rightfulness of government actions—the sense that those actions are morally appropriate and consistent with basic justice and social welfare.

It is quite possible for a small group or a small set of groups to conclude that their government is illegitimate and so does not have the right to exercise authorized power even as the vast majority think that government is rightfully exercising authorized power. In this case, since the dissenting group is small and the great majority see their government as legitimate, the state can be deemed broadly legitimate. Broad legitimacy, therefore, is defined not as unanimous agreement by the people that a government’s authority is rightfully exercised, but simply as a broad sentiment that it is.

Finding Legitimacy: What Does Legitimacy Mean to You?

In this Center for Public Impact video, people from around the world talk about what government legitimacy means to them.

Legitimacy is a vague concept. Citizens’ judgments about legitimacy entail the often-difficult determinations of what is or is not rightful and thus consistent with morality, justice, and social welfare. Judging rightfulness can be a challenging task, as can the determination of whether a regime truly possesses broad legitimacy. Though you cannot always say for certain that a government truly has broad legitimacy, broad illegitimacy is often easy to detect. Indications of governments that do not have broad legitimacy can take many forms, including sustained protests, very low levels of trust in the regime as captured by polling data, and widespread calls for revising or abandoning the constitution.

The most effective governments, Weber argued, not only have laws that clearly authorize power but also have some substantial measure of broad legitimacy. Broadly legitimate governments can exercise power without the threat of popular rebellion, and the state can more readily rely on people to follow the law. These conditions can spare the government the cost of large standing police forces or militaries, and those resources in turn can be allocated in other areas. Unsurprisingly, most governments seek to legitimize their rule.

In the United States, many debates over rival understandings of law and public policy are not debates over legitimacy. For example, many groups in the United States disagree over certain tax policies; some want to increase taxes to pay for greater services, while others want to lower taxes to encourage economic growth. Yet those who oppose a particular tax law rarely refer to it as illegitimate since the law is recognized as coming from a process that has widespread popular support—that is, from the lawmaking process authorized in the US Constitution. Therefore, tax laws that many disfavor are usually not seen as illegitimate, but simply as unpopular or unwise and thus in need of change.

However, in the United States today, more and more debates surrounding law, public policy, and election results are expressed in terms of judgments of their legitimacy or illegitimacy. A true loss of legitimacy, either in the eyes of a small group or in the eyes of the broad populace, occurs only when a law is determined to be so wrong or harmful that it is not right for the government to enact it. In many cases in the United States today, allegations of illegitimacy contend not that a law or electoral result lacks legitimacy because the substance of the law or election outcome is so egregious that it is not a rightful thing for the government to do or to permit, but because they claim the US Constitution does not authorize the law or the process that resulted in a particular outcome.

Consider the 2020 election and debates involving the administration of President Joe Biden . Many supporters of Donald Trump hold that President Biden is an illegitimate president, 7 but they contend not so much that he is so unacceptable that his holding the office of president is inconsistent with morality, justice, and social welfare, but that the governmental officials in charge of running the 2020 presidential election process acted inappropriately or even, some contend, engaged in criminal ballot tampering. For these reasons, to them Biden’s current presidency is unrightful because they see the process by which he was elected as unauthorized. 8 Numerous post-election audits have found the allegations to be without merit. 9 In an April 2021 poll, about three-quarters of Republicans, a quarter of Democrats, and half of Independents indicated that they believe the 2020 election was affected by cheating. 10

These debates are complicated, and it is difficult to pinpoint the origin, rationale, and true motivation behind these judgments that the election results, for example, are illegitimate. What can be said is that there seem to be not only deeply rooted disagreements in the United States over what policies are best, but also deep disagreements about whether a variety of laws or governmental actions are in fact authorized by the Constitution—a development arising because of deepening disagreements among citizens about what the Constitution and the rules it contains actually mean.

Some public allegations that a law or electoral outcome is illegitimate in the sense that it is unauthorized may be mere covers for the genuine view that the laws or the electoral results are themselves unrightful, even if they were authorized. Those making such claims may not wish to be seen as protesting authorized governmental activity since to do so could make them appear lawless or even revolutionary.

The Legitimate Exercise of Power

In some cases, the constitutional law of a governing regime authorizes the suspension of established laws and regulations, allowing the government to act without defined limits on the scope of its authorized actions. A common way this can occur is in regimes that authorize the government to declare states of emergency that suspend the government’s adherence to the ordinary scope of authorized power.

There are strong reasons for states to resist invoking a condition of emergency. Clear lines of government authority, especially in the context of the state’s criminal law, tend to make people less fearful of the state, allowing the state more easily to call upon the people for support and thus enhancing the state’s legitimacy. Nevertheless, many regimes have the authority to declare emergencies—often in response to threats to public safety, such as terrorism—and to act in only vaguely specified ways during these periods.

45 Years Ago, a State of Emergency Was Declared in India

In 1975, during a time of social and political unrest, India’s national government declared a nationwide state of emergency, allowing the government to suspend civil liberties.

States generally see the establishment of public security as critical to their continued broad legitimacy: a state that cannot protect its people is likely to lose the widespread sentiment that it has the right to rule. Yet many states realize the potential negative consequences of unpredictable or unrestrained state action. For this reason, many regimes authorize the declaration of states of emergency , but only for limited periods of time. In France, for example, the president can declare a state of emergency for no more than 12 days, after which any extension must be approved by a majority vote of the legislature. 11 This power was enacted in response to terrorist attacks in 2015 and was renewed periodically until 2017. The state of emergency allowed, for example, certain otherwise unauthorized police procedures, such as searching for evidence without a warrant issued by a judge. 12 France’s law authorizing emergency declarations dates to the 1950s, and that it is fully authorized by the French Constitution and widely approved 13 illustrates that in some circumstances governing regimes can legitimately exercise sweeping and unstructured governmental powers. 14

Where there is broad public support, regimes may periodically and legitimately reauthorize states of emergency. Take, for example, the State of Israel. Israeli law authorizes two different forms of declarations of emergency, one that can be issued only by the legislature and one that can be issued by the government’s executive officials without the need for the legislature’s approval. The first form, which allows the government “to alter any law temporarily,” 15 can remain in effect for up to one year and can be renewed indefinitely. This allows governmental officials to use sweeping powers restricted only by the vague statement that emergency enactments may not “allow infringement upon human dignity.” 16 In addition, The Basic Laws of Israel allow the Israeli government—independent of a declaration of emergency by the legislature—to declare a condition of emergency. 17 These decrees can remain in effect for three months but can also be renewed indefinitely. 18 Pursuant to this authority, the government in 1948 issued an Emergency Defense Regulation that authorized the “establishing [of] military tribunals to try civilians without granting the right of appeal, allowing sweeping searches and seizures, prohibiting publication of books and newspapers, demolishing houses, detaining individuals administratively for an indefinite period, sealing off particular territories, and imposing curfew.” 19 This regulation has been renewed every year since 1948; today it applies mostly to the West Bank. 20 Both forms of emergency decrees have broad support in Israel, 21 indicating the popular sentiment that the Israeli government has the right to invoke such sweeping and unrestricted protocols because of the widely held belief among Israelis that the country faces serious and ongoing threats.

Even when such declarations are authorized and have initial broad support, the extensive use of emergency decrees risks undermining the regime’s legitimacy. In the early 1970s, then-president of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos tested the limits of using emergency declarations to claim sweeping powers. In General Order No. 1, issued on September 22, 1972, Marcos declared:

“I, Ferdinand E. Marcos, President of the Philippines, by virtue of the powers vested in me by the Constitution as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, do hereby proclaim that I shall govern the nation and direct the operation of the entire Government, including all its agencies and instrumentalities.” 22

As one scholar relates, Marcos “took great pains to ensure that his actions would align with the dictates of the law.” 23 The Philippine Constitution at the time allowed the president, in his role as Commander in Chief, to declare an emergency and to use emergency powers. 24 To ensure he could remain in office beyond the two four-year terms allotted to each president by the constitution, Marcos called for a constitutional convention, which was ratified by the population and which changed the position of president into that of a prime minister who could serve as long as the parliament approved. After an additional constitutional change in 1981 that made the office of president once again directly elected by voters, Marcos successfully ran for president, pledging to continue to exercise sweeping unrestricted powers. 25 Marcos has thus been called a “constitutional dictator,” 26 one who came to rule with unrestrained power through a popular constitution and as a leader who himself enjoyed wide popularity.

Martial Law in the Philippines

In 1972, the president of the Phillippines, Ferdinand Marcos, declared martial law. This video clip describes what led up to the proclamation and the extreme conditions in place in the Phillippines under martial law.

At least, that is, at first. Over time, Marcos’s support deteriorated as people tired of his often chaotic and increasingly cruel dictatorship. By 1986, his People Power Revolution saw the electorate turn on him, and the United States pressured him to respect the electoral outcome and leave office. 27

A regime that assumes long-lasting, sweeping, and only vaguely defined authority as the Philippines did under Marcos can become a police state (sometimes called a security state )—that is, a state that uses its police or military force to exercise unrestrained power. When states do not operate within clearly defined legal rules, political scientists say that the government in those states has little respect for the rule of law .

Governments may also exercise unauthorized but legitimate forms of power. Although the absence of authority can be grounds for judging an exercise of power to be illegitimate, this is not always the case. Examples of unauthorized but legitimate government activities tend to fall at two ends of the spectrum of public importance: governmental actions that are generally considered rather insignificant and actions that are deemed to be of tremendous importance, especially in grave moments of crisis.

On one end of the spectrum, as a result of the federal National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, the legal age to purchase or publicly consume alcohol anywhere in the United States is 21. However, this law allows states to make exceptions to the age requirement for individuals under 21 who possess or consume alcohol in the presence of responsible parents. Not all states have created exceptions in their alcohol laws, and the possession of alcohol by anyone under the age of 21 is always technically illegal. 28 But in a number of these states there is such widespread sentiment that possession is acceptable in the presence of responsible adults that there is wide agreement that the state can exercise the unauthorized power to choose not to enforce the law under these conditions.

On the other end of the spectrum, during perceived moments of grave emergency, such as a dire terrorist threat, there may be broad agreement that the government may, legitimately exercise the unauthorized use of power. Princeton professor Kim Lane Scheppele notes that since 9/11 a number of world governments have made “quick responses [to terrorism] that violate the constitutional order followed by a progressive normalization.” 29 These actions might be limited in number, and the broader population may be unaware of their details and scope. Nevertheless, it is arguable that the population is aware that its government is taking unauthorized action in response to terrorist threats and that it supports the government’s right to do so.

The Illegitimate Exercise of Power and the Challenge of Revolutionary Change

Some regimes, though they have established lines of authority, may come to be broadly illegitimate over time. Throughout history, there are many examples of times when the sense that a regime was no longer legitimate led the people to revolt, either by sustained, widespread peaceful protests—such as in the Velvet Revolution in November of 1989 that led to the dissolution of the communist regime of Czechoslovakia—or by internal violent regime change—that is, the use of revolutionary violence. Revolutions intent on removing a constitution almost always seek to replace one constitution with another. Is there a standard of justice that transcends the constitutional law of a particular regime, a standard that can guide a people as they seek to free themselves from one constitution and replace it with another? Historically, in the Western political context, the standard of basic morality, justice, and social welfare has been the set of natural rights guaranteed by the natural law. More recently, the standard is referred to most often as fundamental human rights. (See also Chapter 2: Political Behavior Is Human Behavior and Chapter 3: Political Ideology .) The meaning of these concepts—natural law, natural rights, and human rights—is often contested, and this disagreement complicates any efforts to establish new constitutions to replace illegitimate regimes. Successful revolutionary change faces numerous challenges, including the fact that people might agree that a regime is not worthy of support, but their reasons for that opinion may differ. 30

In the 1930s and 1940s in India, Mahatma Gandhi employed civil disobedience to protest British imperil rule. One way a group can seek to change a law or even an entire governing system is to engage in civil disobedience , the nonviolent refusal to comply with authorized exercises of power. In the 1960s, civil rights groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. used civil disobedience to protest racial discrimination. Although both started out as small protest movements, they grew into movements capable of undermining the broad legitimacy of the governing regimes they opposed.

Methods of Developing Legitimacy

Widespread support for the right of the government to rule can come from a variety of sources. Max Weber argued that broad legitimacy develops in three primary ways. 31 The first of these is what he calls traditional legitimacy , where the governing regime embraces traditional cultural myths and accepted folkways. The United Arab Emirates can be considered an example of a regime with traditional legitimacy. Located in the far eastern section of the Arabian Peninsula, the seven small states that make up the UAE are joined together in a loose confederation, with each ruled by a monarch or emir. This system aligns with long-standing traditional practices of tribal chieftains associating together in a loose alliance to meet common objectives.

The second way legitimacy can accrue, according to Weber, is through charismatic legitimacy , when forceful leaders have personal characteristics that captivate the people. There are many examples of charismatic legitimacy throughout political history. Ruhollah Khomeini , a senior Shi‘a cleric who died in 1989, held remarkable appeal in Iran in the 1970s. Seen by many Iranians as a stern man of God, he was widely thought to be unaffected by the wealth, power, and corruption that so many Iranians saw as typifying the regime of the shah (or king) of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi . Khomeini was revered for his mysticism and his love of poetry. His personal magnetism played a large role in mobilizing Iranians to topple Pahlavi’s government and to replace it with the contemporary constitution of Iran, which establishes a Shi‘a theocracy , 32 a system of government in which religious leaders have authorized governmental power and possess either direct control over the government or enough authorized power to control the government’s policies. 33

Charismatic Che Guevara: Cuban Revolutionary

Revolutionary Che Guevara is revered in Cuba as an anti-establishment hero.

Weber’s third type of legitimacy is what he calls rational-legal legitimacy . This type of legitimacy develops as a result of the clarity and even-handedness with which a regime relates to the people. Take the example of Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), who as the prime minister of Prussia forged a united German state. This new regime gained legitimacy not only because of the shared German culture of the formerly independent German states, but also because of the efficiency of its state bureaucracy, which established a uniform system of law administered by trained public servants.

Based on Weber’s analysis, a regime can secure legitimacy if the following are true:

• The regime solidifies and advances the material interests of a large percentage of the population.
• The regime advances deeply held moral and/or religious principles or advances strongly valued cultural traditions.
• The regime both supports religious, moral, or cultural values and advances the people’s economic interests.
• Based on an emotional sentiment, the people feel a strong emotional connection with the state.
• Based on a habitual respect for the government, the people unreflectively support the regime.

Legitimacy can be thought of as emerging from the agency of the people, who give their support to the regime either as a result of rational reflection, emotional attachment, or the acceptance of customary ways of relating to political power. However, one should not think of the agency of the people, by which they confer legitimacy on the regime, as something that is necessarily wholly independent of the actions of the regime itself. It is possible for a regime to shape the way people relate to it. Regimes employ different tactics toward that end, including government-controlled education, state control of the media and arts and entertainment sectors, and associating the regime, at least in the people’s perceptions, with the cultural or religious views predominant among the governed. As such, although some regimes may well enjoy broad legitimacy by the free choice of their citizenry, the possibility also exists that regimes gain legitimacy through what economist Edward Herman and philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky call (in a different context) “ manufactured consent ”—that is, the shaping of the people’s response to the regime by state programs and activities designed to instill support for the regime, programs that might begin early in the citizens’ lives or that might affect citizens in subtle ways. 34 Examples of this can include widespread and rather blatant government propaganda , usually defined as misleading statements and depictions meant to persuade by means other than rational engagement, or subtle control over the content of what is taught in schools.

The contemporary government of the Eastern European nation of Belarus provides an especially vivid example of a regime seeking to manufacture consent through a coordinated effort to control access to information. Until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Belarus was a part of the Soviet state. After it established independence from the defunct Soviet Union, Belarus adopted a constitution that—on paper at least—requires free and fair elections for major government positions and affirms freedom of the press. Upon taking office as president after his victory in the 1994 election, the current Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko promised to allow broad civil liberties. 35 Yet, over the past 25 years, Lukashenko has exerted tremendous control over the media, including the internet. 36 Media content in Belarus is heavily restricted such that opposition voices are almost never depicted positively, 37 and the regime has used its control over the media to promote Belarusian independence and Belarusian nationalism. 38 It is in this context that Lukashenko has continued to be reelected. The support he receives can be seen as being, to a large degree, a function of his government’s control over the formation of public opinion. To this extent, Lukashenko has followed the tradition of communist nations such as the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, which have a long history of controlling their people’s access to information while advancing throughout society the state’s preferred political messages. The exercise of manufactured consent may not always be so overt in other countries, but it may be just as effective.

Failed and Fragile States

When a state’s ability to exercise control such that it can provide minimal conditions of law, order, and social stability deteriorates to a precariously low level, it is called a fragile state . Fragile states still assert the authority to rule but have serious difficulties actually ruling. The erosion of a state’s legitimacy can lead to state fragility. A fragile state can also occur when a broadly legitimate state has its capacity to provide order depleted as a result of an external force, such as an invading army. 39

If a fragile state loses the capacity to provide minimal conditions of law, order, and social stability entirely, it becomes a failed state . A failed state can emerge either when a state has collapsed so thoroughly that it lacks any governmental power altogether or when a shadow government has emerged—that is, an organization not authorized or desired by the government asserting rule over an area that effectively displaces and serves the same function as the official government. In this situation, internal violent regime change can occur, for if the shadow government becomes strong enough, it can mobilize sufficient power to dislodge entirely the existing regime and install itself as the authorized governmental entity. It may in the process have developed broad legitimacy, or it may simply have sufficient military power to take over the government, possessing the power of government and imposing laws that authorize its rule but not enjoying the wide support of the populace. A fragile government is one that is at serious risk of failing in either of these two ways or of experiencing violent regime change.

In the early 2020s, a shadow government formed in large sections of Afghanistan , and the forces of that shadow government carried out violent regime change. From 1996 until 2001, the Taliban , an extremist Sunni Islamic movement, ruled the Afghan government. In 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks orchestrated by Al Qaeda, a coalition of Western nations invaded Afghanistan. Due to concerns that the Afghan government had allowed the Al Qaeda terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden to operate within the country’s borders, this coalition removed the Taliban from government. The coalition replaced the Taliban government with a governing regime that had considerable elements of representative democracy.

In early 2021, a shadow government led by members of the Taliban resurfaced in areas of Afghanistan. In some of these areas, the Taliban enjoyed wide popularity. Writing in January of 2021, the reporter Mujib Mashal described one such area, the city of Alingar:

“Alingar is . . . an example of how the Taliban have figured out local arrangements to act like a shadow government in areas where they have established control. The insurgents collect taxes . . . and have committees overseeing basic services to the public, including health, education and running local bazaars.” 40

In August 2021, the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul, fell to Taliban forces, and the more democratic regime collapsed. The Taliban has since consolidated its power, issued laws authorizing its regime, and sought to secure legitimacy among the broad Afghan population. Whether Afghanistan’s restored Taliban regime will endure remains an open question.

The current regime of Afghanistan represents a clear example of a fragile state. Fragile states either have a tenuous ability to keep the peace, administer court and educational systems, provide minimal sanitary and health services, and achieve stated goals such as conducting elections, or they are at risk of harboring within them rival organizations that can achieve these goals. Somalia is another example of a fragile state. 41 In more than 30 years of civil war, the regime governing Somalia has at times been at risk of failing to provide even a minimal level of security and stability. The condition in the country has stabilized somewhat from its low point in the early 1990s, when the risk of famine was so acute that the United States deployed military troops in Somalia to protect United Nations workers providing humanitarian relief in the country (a deployment that became controversial in the United States due to significant US military casualties). 42 Somalia, however, still shows signs of fragility. Although the Somali government scheduled national elections to take place in the summer of 2021—the first to be held in decades—these elections have been indefinitely postponed in the face of continuing instability in the region. 43

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

This book may not be used in the training of large language models or otherwise be ingested into large language models or generative AI offerings without OpenStax's permission.

Want to cite, share, or modify this book? This book uses the Creative Commons Attribution License and you must attribute OpenStax.

Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-political-science/pages/1-introduction

• Authors: Mark Carl Rom, Masaki Hidaka, Rachel Bzostek Walker
• Publisher/website: OpenStax
• Book title: Introduction to Political Science
• Publication date: May 18, 2022
• Location: Houston, Texas
• Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-political-science/pages/1-introduction
• Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-political-science/pages/13-1-contemporary-government-regimes-power-legitimacy-and-authority

© Jan 3, 2024 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.

BUS401: Management Leadership

Sources of power.

Read this short segment on power. Which form of power do you believe is the most effective overall? Why?

Power is the ability to influence the behavior of others with or without resistance by using a variety of tactics to push or prompt action.

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

Identify the six different sources of power available to organizational leaders and how leaders can employ these sources of power and influence in a meaningful and ethical way

• Power is the ability to get things done, sometimes over the resistance of others.
• Leaders have a number of sources of power, including legitimate power, referent power, expert power, reward power, coercive power, and informational power.
• All of these sources of power can be used in combination, and people often have access to more than one of them.
• Power tactics fall along three dimensions: behavioral, rational, and structural.

The ability to influence the behavior of others, with or without resistance.

When subordinates influence the decisions of the leader.

When a superior influences subordinates.

Power in Business

Power is the ability to get things done. Those with power are able to influence the behavior of others to achieve some goal or objective. Sometimes people resist attempts to make them do certain things, but an effective leader is able to overcome that resistance. Although people sometimes regard power as evil or corrupt, power is a fact of organizational life and in itself is neither good nor bad. Leaders can use power to benefit others or to constrain them, to serve the organization's goals or to undermine them.

Another way to view power is as a resource that people use in relationships. When a leader influences subordinates, it is called downward power. We can also think of this as someone having power over someone else. On the other hand, subordinates can also exercise upward power by trying to influence the decisions of their leader. Indeed, leaders depend on their teams to get things done and in that way are subject to the power of team members.

The Six Sources of Power

Power comes from several sources, each of which has different effects on the targets of that power. Some derive from individual characteristics; others draw on aspects of an organization's structure. Six types of power are legitimate , referent , expert , reward , coercive , and informational .

Legitimate Power

Also called "positional power," this is the power individuals have from their role and status within an organization. Legitimate power usually involves formal authority delegated to the holder of the position.

Referent Power

Referent power comes from the ability of individuals to attract others and build their loyalty. It is based on the personality and interpersonal skills of the power holder. A person may be admired because of a specific personal trait, such as charisma or likability, and these positive feelings become the basis for interpersonal influence.

Expert Power

Expert power draws from a person's skills and knowledge and is especially potent when an organization has a high need for them. Narrower than most sources of power, the power of an expert typically applies only in the specific area of the person's expertise and credibility.

Reward Power

Reward power comes from the ability to confer valued material rewards or create other positive incentives. It refers to the degree to which the individual can provide external motivation to others through benefits or gifts. In an organization, this motivation may include promotions, increases in pay, or extra time off.

Coercive Power

Coercive power is the threat and application of sanctions and other negative consequences. These can include direct punishment or the withholding of desired resources or rewards. Coercive power relies on fear to induce compliance.

Informational Power

Informational power comes from access to facts and knowledge that others find useful or valuable. That access can indicate relationships with other power holders and convey status that creates a positive impression. Informational power offers advantages in building credibility and rational persuasion. It may also serve as the basis for beneficial exchanges with others who seek that information.

All of these sources and uses of power can be combined to achieve a single aim, and individuals can often draw on more than one of them. In fact, the more sources of power to which a person has access, the greater the individual's overall power and ability to get things done.

Power Tactics

People use a variety of power tactics to push or prompt others into action. We can group these tactics into three categories: behavioral, rational, and structural.

Behavioral tactics can be soft or hard. Soft tactics take advantage of the relationship between the person and the target. These tactics are more direct and interpersonal and can involve collaboration or other social interaction. Conversely, hard tactics are harsh, forceful, and direct and rely on concrete outcomes. However, they are not necessarily more powerful than soft tactics. In many circumstances, fear of social exclusion can be a much stronger motivator than some kind of physical punishment.

Rational tactics of influence make use of reasoning, logic, and objective judgment, whereas nonrational tactics rely on emotionalism and subjectivity. Examples of each include bargaining and persuasion (rational) and evasion and put-downs (nonrational).

Structural tactics exploit aspects of the relationship between individual roles and positions. Bilateral tactics, such as collaboration and negotiation, involve reciprocity on the parts of both the person influencing and the target. Unilateral tactics, on the other hand, are enacted without any participation on the part of the target. These tactics include disengagement and fait accompli . Political approaches, such as playing two against one, take yet another approach to exert influence.

People tend to vary in their use of power tactics, with different types of people opting for different tactics. For instance, interpersonally oriented people tend to use soft tactics, while extroverts employ a greater variety of power tactics than do introverts. Studies have shown that men tend to use bilateral and direct tactics, whereas women tend to use unilateral and indirect tactics. People will also choose different tactics based on the group situation and according to whom they are trying to influence. In the face of resistance, people are more likely to shift from soft to hard tactics to achieve their aims.

Social Sciences

© 2024 Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse LLC . All rights reserved. ISSN: 2153-5760.

Disclaimer: content on this website is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical or other professional advice. Moreover, the views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of Inquiries Journal or Student Pulse, its owners, staff, contributors, or affiliates.

Home | Current Issue | Blog | Archives | About The Journal | Submissions Terms of Use :: Privacy Policy :: Contact

Need an Account?

Forgot password? Reset your password »

Nelson Mandela’s Use of Power Essay

The dark struggle in South Africa saw many black people suffer at the hands of the immigrants—white settlers. In order to combat the situation and forge the path to freedom, majority of native South Africans came together to form an organization known as the African National Congress (ANC). ANC became the vehicle of promoting the interests of black South Africans who felt that the white populations had leaped more than what they sowed.

Additionally, the architects of ANC thought that this was the weapon to combat apartheid and bring civility in the new administration of South Africa. In 1944, Nelson Mandela joined ANC and started participating in its activities. He endured many torrid moments including being imprisoned for almost 27 years. However, in 1994, Nelson Mandela became the first black president of South Africa. This article discusses Nelson Mandela’s use of power.

During all his struggles, Nelson Mandela understood very well the needs and desires of the people. He believed in the ideology that all men are equal and should not be discriminated against any form. This was the main reason why he always refused to abandon his political beliefs for political freedom.

Not even prison would stop Nelson Mandela from achieving his ambitions. Today, Nelson Mandela is known across the globe for his struggle, and what he did during the apartheid era in South Africa. The man who spent his entire life fighting for the rights of his people became the symbol of struggle not only to black South Africans, but also the entire world. The use of his power is also another thing that has caught the attention of the world (Guiloineau, 2002, pp. 10-26).

Nelson Mandela was the unifying factor in the post-apartheid era pitting black South Africans and the white populations. Although many white populations feared that Nelson Mandela would retaliate against them, he chose otherwise.

He promised to uphold the constitution—something he did. Nelson Mandela did not use his power to benefit himself; instead, he devoted his presidency in serving the republic of South Africa and its citizens. Apartheid became a thing of the past even, as the black South Africans became free in their own country. It is true that Nelson Mandela suffered so much in the hands of the white minority rule, but after becoming president, transformative power, reconciliation, and tolerance became the pillars of his administration.

He was a man who understood what power means, and he always devoted his time to ensure peaceful coexistence among all South Africans. He taught the world the meaning of humanity, by besieging people to live and see each other as equals. In fact, Nelson Mandela used his power to show the world how justice and tolerance overpowers even the greatest of cruelties.

He used his power to combat racism and other racial related vices that had taken roots in South Africa. Mandela knew very well that by eliminating such vices, people will live harmoniously thereafter. Indeed, this was a show of humility, resilience and tolerance. Mandela led sustained movements in order to promote and protect the rights of all South Africans. Consequently, many South Africans felt secure in an equal society. He took various strides to eliminate discrimination and set the path of justice and equality.

Through his presidency, discrimination of the base of ethnicity, race and even sexual orientation, all became a thing of the past. He used his power to promote education for all, cultural exchanges, ambient public service, and many more fundamental freedoms. Just like Nelson Mandela, many of the current world leaders can lead sustained efforts to promote cohesion; tolerance, equality, and justice for all just like what Mandela did (Mandela, 1996, pp. 23-47).

Guiloineau, J., Rowe, J. (2002). Nelson Mandela: the early life of Rolihlahla Mandiba. Berkeley, California. North Atlantic Books.

Mandela, N. (1996). The Illustrated Long Walk to Freedom . Paul Duncan (abridgement and picture editing). Boston: Little Brown and Company.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, July 20). Nelson Mandela’s Use of Power. https://ivypanda.com/essays/nelson-mandela/

"Nelson Mandela’s Use of Power." IvyPanda , 20 July 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/nelson-mandela/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Nelson Mandela’s Use of Power'. 20 July.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Nelson Mandela’s Use of Power." July 20, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/nelson-mandela/.

1. IvyPanda . "Nelson Mandela’s Use of Power." July 20, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/nelson-mandela/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Nelson Mandela’s Use of Power." July 20, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/nelson-mandela/.

• Role Model: Nelson Mandela
• Nelson Mandela “Freedom in Africa”
• Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress
• Achievements of Nelson Mandela
• Nelson Mandela Leadership Style
• Nelson Mandela: Biography and Influences
• "Nelson Mandela, Autobiography" Book
• Nelson Mandela’s Speech from the Dock
• Nelson Mandela: Analysis of Personality
• Mandela’s Leadership
• Darfur Genocide
• Use of Arts in the Second World War by Nazi
• Rwandan Students, Ethnic Tensions Lurk
• Genocide in Rwanda: Insiders and Outsiders
• Somalia: A History of Events

DSpace JSPUI

Egyankosh preserves and enables easy and open access to all types of digital content including text, images, moving images, mpegs and data sets.

• IGNOU Self Learning Material (SLM)
• 01. School of Humanities (SOH)
• Bachelor's Degree Programmes
• Bachelor's Degree Programme(BDP)
• Electives Courses
• Bachelor of Arts (BA)
• Political Science
• EPS-11 Political Ideas and Ideologies

Block-4 Power, Authority and Legitimacy Collection home page