During recent years, civil society legitimacy has generated a growing interest in scholarly research. The present article therefore proposes four normative criteria, namely, independence, transparency, participation, and inclusion, in order to start assessing civil society legitimacy...

Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) play an active and noteworthy role in governance, both at the national and international level. Three questions arise: First, how do CSOs exercise their advocacy, what repertoires, strategies and resources do they use? Second, to what degree are they...

This paper deals with the ways in which the interconnectedness of multiple political levels in increaingly internationalized structures of governance impacts on these levels' democratic legitimation. Focusing on the European Union (EU), it argues that in the EU's multi-level system, the...

This paper discusses the potential contribution of parliamentary institutions and networks to the democratization of global economic governance. It places the analysis in the context of the larger debate on the democratic deficit of international economic institutions, in particular the WTO. On...

The idea of a "chain of legitimation" is a central thought in German constitutional theory. However, the conception of a chain of legitimacy does not appear to be sufficient to justify transnational democracy. Starting from this diagnosis, the paper introduces an alternative conception of...

Drawing on theories of legitimacy and democratic deficits in international politics this paper provides an actor-centered relational approach of mapping legitimacy-flows within the transnational policy network of the Bologna Process for a European Higher Education Area. It is shown that...

The legitimacy of international institutions is a contested issue both in terms of concept formation and empirical evidence and attracts attention from across the political sciences. The present contribution posits a relational concept of legitimacy that includes self-justification of rulers on...

In this paper we examine the Chinese domestic discourse centering on Shanghai's participation in the PISA study and interpretations of the 2009 results. The main focus is to examine why local education authority took part in the PISA project and how actors from the education authority use PISA...

In this working paper, we treat legitimacy and legitimation as interactive, discursive and relational concepts: Legitimacy is socially constructed in the public spheres of (democratic) political regimes, that is, in discursive exchanges of political elites and citizens about the acceptability of...