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| Tradition, charisma and rational-legality
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| Legitimacy is "a value whereby something or someone is recognized and accepted as right and proper".[6] In political science, legitimacy has traditionally been understood as the popular acceptance and recognition by the public of the authority of a governing régime, whereby authority has political power through consent and mutual understandings, not coercion. The three types of political legitimacy described by German sociologist Max Weber, in "Politics as Vocation", are traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal:
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| Traditional legitimacy derives from societal custom and habit that emphasize the history of the authority of tradition. Traditionalists understand this form of rule as historically accepted, hence its continuity, because it is the way society has always been. Therefore, the institutions of traditional government usually are historically continuous, as in monarchy and tribalism.
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| Charismatic legitimacy derives from the ideas and personal charisma of the leader, a person whose authoritative persona charms and psychologically dominates the people of the society to agreement with the government's régime and rule. A charismatic government usually features weak political and administrative institutions, because they derive authority from the persona of the leader, and usually disappear without the leader in power. However, if the charismatic leader has a successor, a government derived from charismatic legitimacy might continue.
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| Rational-legal legitimacy derives from a system of institutional procedure, wherein government institutions establish and enforce law and order in the public interest. Therefore, it is through public trust that the government will abide the law that confers rational-legal legitimacy.[7]
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| More recent scholarship distinguishes between multiple other types of legitimacy in an effort to draw distinctions between various approaches to the construct. These include empirical legitimacy versus normative legitimacy, instrumental versus substantive legitimacy, popular legitimacy, regulative legitimacy, and procedural legitimacy.[8][9][10] Types of legitimacy draw distinctions that account for different sources of legitimacy, different frameworks for evaluating legitimacy, or different objects of legitimacy.[11][12]
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| Interactive dignity
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| Legitimacy in conflict zones, where multiple authorities compete over authority and legitimacy, can rest on other sources. The theory of interactive dignity by Weigand shows that interactions are key for the construction of substantive legitimacy in such contexts.[13] The aspect of an authority that most concerns people in the absence of other accountability mechanisms are its actions, particularly with regard to how authorities interact with them on a day-to-day basis. The value-based expectation people have with regard to such interactions is one of human dignity.[14] People expect procedures to be fair and practices to be respectful, reflecting a serving rather than an extractive attitude.[15] As long as authorities do not satisfy people's more immediate expectation of interactive dignity, people support and consider alternative authorities to be more legitimate.
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