legitimacy. We argue that this development can be accounted for by a mechanism we call "authority-legitimation mechanism". We …

Power, rule, and legitimacy have always been core concerns of political science. In the 1970s, when governability … appeared to be problematic, legitimacy was discussed both in the context of policy research and by critics of the capitalist … state. More recently interest turned to governance beyond the nation-state. The legitimacy of transnational (i.e., European …

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 transnational legitimacy. In this conception, the layer of legitimacy … provided by the chain of legitimation is complemented by a layer of legitimacy that is provided by political practices at the …