Abstract
This article outlines an approach to building a country-level legitimacy index designed specifically for European Union member states. The index allows intercountry as well as longitudinal comparisons. Changes over time reflect varying levels of confidence in the political system and may serve as leading indicators for differences in the economic, social, and political stability of member states. Source data for the index are derived from the European Social Survey, taken between 2002 and 2012 in 35 countries. The index is built around three dimensions (legality, justification, and consent). Results from the index vary among member states but, overall, show a tendency toward diminishing legitimacy. Citizens trust their police forces and laws, but are dissatisfied with institutions and the economy. Moreover, they feel increasing distance from their leaders, their representative bodies, and the effectiveness of political institutions. These trends highlight the need for public–private efforts to increase the legitimacy of European Union member states.
Introduction
Legitimacy affects a country’s competitiveness and growth. States, just like organizations, must find competitive advantages (Porter, 2002) and adjust to the social and economic demands of its environment (Blanco-González, Díez-Martín, & Prado-Román, 2015, Díez-Martín et al., 2016) in order to survive and gain access to necessary resources. Institutions need to create an impression of sustainability and legitimacy so they will receive support from their stakeholders and be competitive (Cruz-Suárez, Prado-Román, & Prado-Román, 2014, Grigoli & Mills, 2014). Achieving this source of competitive advantage is the main reason states must pay attention to their legitimacy (Blanco-González et al., 2015; Díez-Martín, Blanco-González, & Prado-Román, 2016).
Once an institution is legitimized, it benefits from greater support from its stakeholders (Choi & Shepherd, 2005), better access to outside investment (Deeds, Mang, & Frandsen, 2004; Deephouse & Suchman, 2008; Díez-Martín, Prado-Román, & Blanco-González, 2013; Higgins & Gulati, 2006), and increased customer (or in this case, citizen) satisfaction (Blanco-González et al., 2015; Gilley, 2006). Therefore, a state must demonstrate legitimacy if it wants to attract investment with which to develop its economy.
State legitimacy is the degree of support of its citizens for the operation and exercise of political power (Beetham, 1991, Easton, 1975; Gilley, 2006). States with low legitimacy spend most of their efforts on staying in power rather than on effectively managing their institutions. This makes them more vulnerable to citizen unrest and economic turbulence (Baum & Oliver, 1991; Gilley, 2006).
These type of legitimacy-influencing factors (such as political support, institutional trust, voter turnout, or involvement in public events) are key for the social, political, and economic equilibrium in Europe, the European integration process, the strength of the euro, and public support for European common policies.
How should legitimacy be measured for European Union (EU) countries? Previous studies have developed legitimacy measuring tools for countries at a global scale (Gilley, 2006, 2012) or for politically unstable countries (Power & Cyr, 2009). These indexes tend to use indicators that do not offer enough nuances among similar countries. For example, Gilley (2006) uses indicators such as political violence or respect for human rights. These work for a global legitimacy index but do not offer a way to differentiate among countries where these values are similar. Therefore, an index built for the EU must be able to allow comparisons among countries such as France, Spain, or Germany.
In a sense, what is needed is an index based on measures that add more depth and thus offer useful information for states that have similar levels of political, economic, and social stability; an index that can also take the place of a leading indicator for changes that influence policy decisions and the economy (Power & Cyr, 2009), in a similar way to the Consumer Confidence Index, the competitiveness index, or the consumer price index.
In conclusion, the objectives of this article are to build a legitimacy index based on the specific characteristics of EU member states; and to see how this metric evolves over time, noting any upward or downward trends. To achieve these goals, we first define the concept of state legitimacy and its influencing factors. After that, we explain the sample used and index-building methodology. We then present the results broken down by countries, dimensions, and rate of change. Finally, we explain how to interpret this index and how it can influence the stability of EU member states and become an effective indicator for policy making.
State Legitimacy and Its Dimensions
In a broad sense, legitimacy is a condition reflecting consonance with relevant rules or laws, normative support, and cultural alignment (Scott, 1995). Its importance lies in the fact that having its activities seen as acceptable and desirable by the social groups in its environment will allow an organization greater access to the resources it needs to grow and survive (Zimmerman & Zeitz, 2002). Numerous institutions have failed not for lack of resources, financing, or competitiveness; but because they lost their legitimacy (Ahlstrom & Bruton, 2001; Chen, Griffith, & Hu, 2006; Díez-Martín, Blanco-González, & Prado-Román, 2010).
Long-living institutions are the ones that adjust to the pressures in its environment and act according to socially accepted laws, norms, and values (Díez-Martín et al., 2010, 2016). Conversely, when an institution loses its legitimacy, social rejection will difficult access to resources and limit or void its competitiveness and productivity (Díez-Martín et al., 2013; Díez-Martín et al., 2016; Grigoli & Mills, 2014).
In political science, legitimacy is a key concept that refers to how different uses of power influence its conscious acceptance by its constituents (Beetham, 1991, Easton, 1975; Gilley, 2006). State legitimacy is a key determinant of a country’s structure and operations. States with low legitimacy dedicate more resources to maintaining control and less to effective governance. This reduces their social support and makes them vulnerable to being overthrown and more sensitive to economic instability (Blanco-González et al., 2015; Gilley, 2006).
Legitimacy can be studied at numerous levels: for institutions, processes, or individual actors. In this research article, we focus on the state level, which is the basic institutional and ideological structure of a political community (Gilley, 2006). In democratic countries, citizens distinguish between their views on the state and its political parties. A state’s stability is guaranteed by citizen participation and good governance (Lillbacka, 1999; Muller, Jukam, & Seligson, 1982).
In this sense, there is a necessary distinction between the legitimacy of the state as an institution and other political sciences concepts like democratic legitimacy, effectiveness, or satisfaction. This article studies how much the state as an institution is socially accepted; but not how much social or otherwise support exists for democracy (Dahl, 1971; Easton, 1975; Gunther, Nikiforos Diamandouros, & Phle, 1995; Inglehart, 1997; Linz, 1988; or Torcal & Montero, 2006, among others).
State legitimacy has been analyzed from three points of view first laid out by Beetham (1991): legality, normative justifiability, and expressed consent.
From the point of view of legality or acceptance of legal authority, the state exercises its political power in concordance with its citizen’s views on laws, rules, and customs. These are important because they are generally applied and predictable. Rules create predictability in social life, which is in itself a moral good. An example of this dimension is how citizens perceive corruption and the rule of law or the actions of the police.
Second, the perspective of normative justifiability looks at shared principles in a specific society: its ideas and values. Citizens react to the moral reasons a state gives to act a certain way. Legitimacy arises from the degree of synchrony with the shared moral values in the discourse of its citizens (Nevitte & Kanji, 2002). In other words, there is a set of shared beliefs that intermediate power relationships (Beetham, 1991). The notion of moral congruency between state and society is the basis of the literature on comparative politics and sociology (e.g., Nevitte & Kanji, 2002). Some indicators of this dimension are trust in political leadership or opinions on the effectiveness of political institutions.
Third, acts of expressed consent or political support provide a complementary explanation for state legitimacy, citizen support, and participation that does not have a normative root as the two previous dimensions. At any given time, a citizen can only evaluate the legality or justification of a small fraction of the entire system regulated by political power. To fill this legitimacy gap, “acts of expressed consent” are those positive actions that express the acknowledgment by a citizen that the state possesses overarching political authority and that he or she must follow the resulting decisions. Examples of acts of expressed consent would be voter turnout, level of participation in associations, or membership in political parties.
In sum, institutions (i.e., states) are more legitimate when they follow their own rules (legality), generally accepted norms (normative justifiability), and beliefs (acts of expressed consent; Scott, 1995). Legitimacy can be lost, kept, or acquired. For this reason, institutions should actively manage it (Deeds et al., 2004; Suchman, 1995). Several studies have analyzed how certain actions can help obtain, or lose, legitimacy (e.g., Phillips, Lawrence, & Hardy, 2004). Their findings confirm Suchman’s (1995) that oftentimes, the best course of action is simply to adjust to what the environment is asking for. Knowing that legitimacy can be managed, are all three dimensions of legitimacy equally important in building a legitimacy index?
We know that legitimacy is a concept that admits degrees (Walzer, 2002) and can have varying degrees of intensity (Gurr, 1971). Following Beetham (1991), Gilley (2006, 2012), Seligson and Booth (2009), and Power and Cyr (2009), the three dimensions should have different weights. For these authors, legality carries 25% of the importance in determining state legitimacy, acts of expressed consent another 25%, and normative justifiability the remaining 50%. The important takeaway in this distribution is that a state will most effectively improve its legitimacy by carrying out actions that improve its normative justifiability.
Finally, legitimacy can be managed to better support the objectives of the institution or to obtain access to resources. In the context of this article, legitimacy can be used to increase the level of competitiveness or citizen support (Suchman, 1995). More important, legitimacy considerations make possible an alternative paradigm to rational decision making (Díez-Martín et al., 2010). Individuals are influenced by how correct or appropriate they believe the decisions made by other legitimized individuals or institutions are (Zelditch, 2001). Legitimacy is able to create a sense of obligation that allows the more legitimized organizations to obtain voluntary consent of external agents (Tyler, 2006). Therefore, changes in legitimacy may precede political change or profound political, economic, or social crises.
Sample and Methodology to Build a Legitimacy Index
To build the legitimacy index, we followed the guidelines used by other well-regarded indexes in high-impact publications, such as the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index. This index measures consumer attitudes on the business climate, personal finance, and spending (Vosen & Schmidt, 2011). Another index we studied, the Consumer Confidence Index, is designed to measure overall consumer confidence, relative financial health, and purchasing power of the average U.S. consumer (Kwan & Cotsomitis, 2006; Tsalikis & Seaton, 2007). It achieves this by providing a score between 0 and 1 that is modified by positive, negative, and neutral indicators; allowing us to analyze change over time.
Every 2 years, the Standing Committee for the Social Sciences of the European Science Foundation leads the European Social Survey (ESS). This is an effort to measure change in the attitudes, beliefs, and behavior patterns of the various populations in Europe, improve the quality of quantitative measures, and establish a set of solid social indicators to evaluate well-being in European countries.
As shown in Table 1, each country sampled in the ESS is representative of all residents older than 15 years in that country, independently of their nationality, citizenship, or language. Individuals surveyed are selected by random sampling. For these reasons, the ESS is ideally suited for use in building a legitimacy index.
Sample Sizes of the European Social Survey, by Country.
Source. European Social Survey (2012).
In essence, to measure state legitimacy, we adapt the indicators proposed by Gilley (2006) to the particularities of the EU by means of the ESS. As Gilley (2012) notes, it is possible to use the results of social surveys to build a state legitimacy measure as they contain indicators of social and political nature (Grimes, 2008; Hechter, 2009; Rothstein, 2010).
To this end, we collect the biannual ESS data for years 2002 to 2012 and select 20 items (identified in Table 2) that measure legitimacy by referring to citizen’s acceptance, trust, an public participation in the countries analyzed (2 items for legality, 8 for normative justifiability, and 10 for expressed consent).
State Legitimacy Indicators.
Source. European Social Survey (2012).
Some additional data homogenization is necessary to allow us to compare the different measures. As shown in Table 3, the scales of the items in the ESS are not homogeneous. Some of them receive values between 1 and 10, others between 1 and 2, and some data cleansing was also necessary. Scales are converted to 0 to 1 by applying base 10 logarithms (0 = minimum legitimacy; 1 = maximum legitimacy), and variables on the 1 to 2 scale are recoded by reversing the values (2 = no legitimacy; 1 = full legitimacy). Following these transformations, we calculate the average values. This allows us to compare items and obtain a robust index (Hair, Black, Babin, & Anderson, 2009).
Building the State Legitimacy Index.
Source. European Social Survey (2012).
Results
Analyzing state legitimacy by each of its constituent dimensions allows us to identify areas where each country needs to improve or at least question why these values are so. Table 4 shows legitimacy levels by dimension in each of the EU countries in the 2002 to 2012 time period. Overall, the legality dimension has results above 0.5 and remains approximately stable.
State Legitimacy by Legitimacy Dimension Between 2002 and 2012.
Note. EU = European Union.
In 2012, Eurozone results (0.71) were superior to non-Eurozone results (0.68) and the EU (0.70). The Nordic countries have the highest scores in this area are (2012: Denmark, 0.88; Finland, 0.86; Norway, 0.84) and the lowest is Ukraine (0.40).
For the normative justifiability dimension, values are generally lower than legality. Even though many countries are above 0.50, these become progressively lower over time. Examining results by Eurozone, EU, or nonmember countries does not provide additional insight. In 2012, Eurozone and EU were at 0.61, while non-EU countries were at 0.63. In other words, nonmember citizens believe that power is exercised with a slightly greater moral justification in their countries.
Again, Nordic countries obtain the highest values; although approximately 10 points lower than in the previous dimension. Ukraine or Bulgaria are below 0.50. It is notable that countries that have gone through an especially strong economic recession show decreasing values (Greece went from 0.61 in 2002 to 0.40 in 2010; Portugal from 0.54 in 2002 to 0.49 in 2010; Spain from 0.65 in 2002 to 0.60 in 2010).
Regarding acts of expressed consent, these are generally lower than the two previous dimensions. None of the countries under study received a “pass” (0.50). This is proof of low citizen participation. Iceland (0.37) has the highest values in 2012, followed by Sweden (0.34) and Norway (0.32). The lowest values for the same year are in Bulgaria (0.17), Estonia (0.17), Kosovo (0.17), Ukraine (0.17), Poland (0.16), Portugal (0.15), Hungary (0.15), and Lithuania (0.13).
As with normative justifiability, acts of expressed consent are higher in non-EU member countries than in EU or Eurozone countries. For example, in 2012, nonmember countries reflected a score of 0.23, while the others had 0.22.
Table 5 shows the countries we analyzed ranked by their legitimacy index, in descending order. Nordic countries have the highest state legitimacy scores, more than half are over the “passing mark” of 0.5, and those beneath that have gone through periods of economic instability. These results reinforce Gilley’s (2012) while offering some additional nuance.
Weighted State Legitimacy Results, Descending.
Index variations allow us to see which countries have been able to increase their legitimacy and therefore acceptance by their citizens (Table 6). A straightforward way of studying these data is by classifying the countries in four blocks (increase, maintain, decrease while keeping relative position, or lose). From 2002 to 2012, Finland increased its legitimacy by 22.26%, Germany by 10.69% (possibly because of their European leadership in this time period), and Norway by 9.65%. The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, Belgium, France, Israel, the Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom increased or maintained their legitimacy. Italy, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Austria, and Estonia lost legitimacy, which could have political, social, and economic consequences for their states.
Percentage Variation in the Weighted State Legitimacy Index Measure.
Note. All values are in percentage.
Discussion and Implications
This article set out to construct a state legitimacy index adapted to the particularities of the EU. Seeing how this index evolves over time allows us to observe trends in citizen trust and acceptance of their state’s actions. Having a legitimate state confers competitive advantages and is symptomatic of political, economic, and social stability (Blanco-González et al., 2015; Gilley, 2006, Power & Cyr, 2009). Conversely, countries that lack legitimacy expend more resources on maintaining political stability and not as many on effective governance (Gilley, 2006). The effect of this is that citizen trust and support for these political power wanes and the economic and social stability of these countries is compromised (Gilley, 2006).
The legitimacy index for EU member states was built on data from the ESS. This index is therefore more precisely tailored for the specific conditions of the EU and, in comparison with previous global legitimacy indexes (Gilley, 2012), reflects more detailed information on these states. These global indexes contain indicators reflecting respect for human rights, citizen unrest, or number of coups. In an area with political stability like Europe, these measures do not allow for discrimination among legitimacy levels. These types of indexes are most valuable in areas with greater differences among states like, for example, Latin America (Power & Cyr, 2009). In conclusion, we built an index that allows us to compare varying legitimacy levels among EU countries and identify disparities that could endanger the implementation of common policies.
On the one hand, each of the three dimensions analyzed evidenced different legitimacy levels. First, citizens trust their police forces and laws, which is reflected in the stable and relatively high score (above 0.50) for the “legality” dimension. Second, citizens have also lost faith in that the principles that their states follow. Over time, there is a growing rift between the commonly understood moral values in society and how states are acting.
These progressively lower values for “normative justifiability” indicate that citizens feel increasing distance from their leaders, their representative bodies, and the effectiveness of political institutions. A possible outcome of such a situation is the emergence of new political movements (such as Syriza in Greece, Podemos and Ciudadanos in Spain, or far right parties in central Europe) or political instability at the state level (like in Ukraine).
Third, the “acts of consent” dimension has the lowest values of the three; not reaching even 0.50 in any of the countries under analysis. These results demonstrate low appreciation for political authority; making itself evidence in low voter turnouts and the insularity of political parties. In consequence, the countries’ problems are seen as the result of its leaders and institutions without any sense of accountability for its citizens. Low or decreasing results like these can create political uncertainty around support for certain policies, such as the idea of a common Europe, or observance of the authorities.
On the other hand, the longitudinal analysis of state legitimacy allows us to observe changes over time. While the results match those obtained by other legitimacy indexes, the information we glean from the different dimensions or rates of change varies due to the nature of these specific inputs (Gilley, 2006, 2012). Between 2002 and 2012, Nordic countries lead the ranking and Germany gained legitimacy—a possible result of its role as a European leader. Countries that suffered economic bailouts or had its policies questioned at the European institutional level saw their legitimacy indexes undermined (Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, and Ireland).
For these reasons, the results of the current research confirm that a legitimacy index can serve as a tool to measure government effectiveness, anticipate political, social, or economic difficulties for states, and affect a country’s competitiveness. A joint public–private effort is needed to improve these measures. Governments need to not only increase citizen satisfaction by ensuring the rule of law and functioning political, educational, and health care systems they also need to encourage voter participation. This way, as it builds legitimacy, confidence in the state as a whole will increase, the economic system will be more stable, and investors will be attracted—thus increasing the resources available and affecting rankings such as the Global Competitiveness Index or the Doing Business Index.
Finally, as in every research, there are certain limitations to the current study. It would be necessary to analyze the correlation between legitimacy and political, social, and economic variables. This would validate the notion that changes in economic indicators such as jobs growth have an effect on a state legitimacy.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.