Legitimacy part II

I've been away for a couple of weeks, partly due to taking Command and General Staff College on the weekends, and partly because I'm writing a paper for submission to a peer-reviewed journal. The topic of the paper is the topic of tonight's post on Legitimacy, part II.

I've been doing a lot of reading about legitimacy in the political science literature because counterinsurgency doctrine demands legitimizing the established government as a method of opposing the insurgents. Democracy is founded on the idea of 'legitimate' representation. So, I began to wonder what exactly is "legitimacy"?

As it turns out there are several theoretical models of legitimacy which are usually presented in lit reviews, beginning with Max Weber. I'm not going to go through all the models, here, at least not now. The models are useful and intriguing, and describe how legitimacy is essentially a relationship between a population and a government. Legitimacy of the government can be produced via coercion, on the "less legitimate/more unstable" side of the scale, or via consent on the "very legitimate/very stable" side of the scale. So first of all, in a counterinsurgency, we want popular consent--or at least we want the slider on the scale to rest more toward the "consent" side and less toward the "coercion" side. So far so good. Nothing revelatory.

Here's what I found, though, that I think is revelatory. In a journal article from March 1990, "Legitimacy, Religion, and Nationalism in the Middle East" author G. Hossein Razi makes the case that legitimacy is actually a 2-part construct. He doesn't exactly say this--this is my summarization. First, he says there are two basic meanings: 1) that legitimacy means the set of norms and values relating to politics which are sufficiently shared so that a political system becomes possible; and 2) that legitimacy deals with meanings of the purpose of the government, the rights and obligations of the government and the governed and the methods of selection, change and accountability of the government personnel. We normally use legitimacy with the second meaning.

And here comes my 'Ah Ha' moment. The second part of the legitimacy construct is "performance."

Razi says: "...there has been insufficient grasp of the difference between the nature and sources of legitimacy and those of performance (i.e., the production of goods and services and generation of organized instruments of physical compulsion)."(pg 71). He points out that "Success in performance areas... does not necessarily result in an increase in legitimacy....the simultaneous existence of a problem in legitimacy and a problem in performance "characterizes most of the 'crises'" of the Third World...."(pg 72)
(cite:G. Hossein Razi, Legitimacy, Religion , and Nationalism in the Middle East. The American Political Science Review. Vol 84, No. 1, March 1990. pp. 69-91)

To explain what this means in concrete terms: I was recently culling through poll data from the Asia Foundation on Afghanistan (available here:http://www.asiafoundation.org/country/afghanistan/2008-poll.php) . Although the government has performed well in health and education development, and the public recognizes the performance, the overall optimism about the way the country is going is declining. In fact, in spite of recognized gains, the public opinion about the performance of the central government has decreased from 80% positive in 2007 to 67% in 2008. (pg. 53). One would expect performance to be legitimizing by way of producing positive benefit to the people, and the people expressing satisfaction with that benefit. But this apparently not the case in Afghanistan.

It seems to me that a partial explanation is that perhaps the people of Afghanistan do not expect the central government to provide health care. First, there hasn't ever been a real central government for any meaningful stretch of time, and next, no quasi governmental agency ever provided health care. And the fact that the new government does provide health care is nice, but does not change their overall view of the government. It seems from the poll data that economic benefit is expected the most.

A second idea I had was that Afghanistan is a clientelistic political system with patrons collecting resources to dole out to their clients. Because Afghanistan has never had a health system (hence the name "reconstruction" is a fallacy), trading health benefits might not yet be widely perceived to be a useful trading tool. If it becomes a useful trading tool, then there might be commensurate importance placed on government performance in this area.

The problem here is that the use of medicine for counter insurgency and stability operations seems to not be functioning, at least this year. We know so little about legitimacy, that it is hard to posit a time frame for when development activities would actually "legitimize" the government. In fact I suspect that it's probably unique to the culture we are working with. We also don't understand the other variables in the system--I suspect that we don't even know what they are more less their relationships to each other. As with most other important questions of the day, I can say I conclude that "more research is needed."


I read another interesting journal article about health development in Guatemala that sums up everything pretty well, I think:

"Development strategies that attempt to make improvements in the lives of the rural poor without addressing the underlying structural causes of poverty serve to deflect attention away from the real needs of impoverished communities. Though the underlying ideology is that local people should have a voice in solving their own problems, the definitions of the problems and the determination of priorities are usually the prerogative of the outside agencies."

(Cite: Green, Linda Buckley. Consensus and Coercion: Primary Health Care and the Guatemalan State. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series, Vol 3, No. 3, The Political Economy of Primary Health Care in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador (Sept 1989). pp 246-257.)