Political Theory has undergone a remarkable development in recent years. From a state in which it was once declared dead, it has come to occupy a central place in the study of Politics. Both political ideas and the wide-ranging arguments to which they give rise are now treated in a rigorous, analytical fashion, and political theorists have contributed to disciplines as diverse as economics, sociology and law. These developments have made the subject more challenging and exciting, but they have also added to the difficulties of students and others coming to the subject for the first time. Much of the burgeoning literature in specialist books and journals is readily intelligible only to those who are already well-versed in the subject.
Max Weber’s typology of legitimate ‘Herrschaft’ has provided the basis for the treatment of legitimacy in twentieth century sociology and political science. The thesis of the article is that this typology is a misleading tool for the analysis of the modern state, and especially for the comparative analysis of political systems. This is because of basic flaws in Weber’s conceptualisation of legitimacy itself, and in his account of the normative basis of authority. The article offers an alternative, multi-dimensional, account of political legitimacy, and suggests how it might be used to develop a typology of forms of ‘Herrschaft’ more appropriate to the analysis of the modern state.
This survey of the literature on conditions for democratic consolidation suggests the necessity of going beyond procedural definitions of democracy (based on fair, honest and periodic elections) to more normative ideas about decision‐making being controlled by all members of the group as equals. In this view, democracy is a matter of the degreeto which basic principles are realised and democratisation is always and everywhere an unfinished process. Four factors which facilitate democratic consolidation — the experience of transition itself, a country's economic system, its political culture and its constitutional arrangements — are analysed through an assessment of ten key hypotheses implicit in the literature.
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