Legitimacy as a Social Process

Operationalizing Legitimacy

Legitimacy is widely invoked as a condition, cause, and outcome of other social phenomena, yet measuring legitimacy is a persistent challenge. In this article, I synthesize existing approaches to conceptualizing legitimacy across the social sciences to identify widely agreed upon definitional properties. I then build on these points of consensus to develop a generalizable approach to operationalization. Legitimacy implies specific relationships among three empirical elements: an object of legitimacy, an audience that confers legitimacy, and a relationship between the two. Together, these empirical elements constitute a dyad (i.e., a single unit consisting of two nodes and a tie). I identify three necessary conditions for legitimacy— expectations, assent, and conformity—that specify how elements of the dyad interact. I detail how these conditions can be used to empirically establish legitimacy (and illegitimacy), distinguishing it from dissimilar phenomena that often appear similar empirically. Followed to its logical conclusion, this operationalization has novel implications for understanding the effects of legitimacy. I discuss these implications, and how they inform debates over the relevance of legitimacy as an explanation for socially significant outcomes.

The Psychology of Legitimacy: A Relational Perspective on Voluntary Deference to Authorities

People within organized groups often internalize their feelings of obligation to obey group rules and the decisions of group authorities. They believe that group authorities and rules are legitimate and, hence, entitled to be obeyed. Because of this belief, group members voluntarily accept and obey rules and decisions from group authorities. This review draws on evidence from studies of authorities in political, legal, managerial, educational, and family settings to explore why people view as legitimate and voluntarily defer to group authorities. Two theories about legitimacy are contrasted: resource-based theories, represented by instrumental models, and identification based theories, represented by the relational model. The findings provide strong support for the existence of a relational component of legitimacy, suggesting that authorities draw an important part of their legitimacy from their social relationship with group members. The findings also show that there is an instrumental component to legitimacy. Hence, the psychology of legitimacy involves both instrumental and relational elements.

Psychological Perspectives on Legitimacy and Legitimation

Legitimacy is a psychological property of an authority, institution, or social arrangement that leads those connected to it to believe that it is appropriate, proper, and just. Because of legitimacy, people feel that they ought to defer to decisions and rules, following them voluntarily out of obligation rather than out of fear of punishment or anticipation of reward. Being legitimate is important to the success of authorities, institutions, and institutional arrangements since it is difficult to exert influence over others based solely upon the possession and use of power. Being able to gain voluntary acquiescence from most people, most of the time, due to their sense of obligation increases effectiveness during periods of scarcity, crisis, and conflict. The concept of legitimacy has a long history within social thought and social psychology, and it has emerged as increasingly important within recent research on the dynamics of political, legal, and social systems.

Do the disadvantaged legitimize the social system? A large-scale test of the status–legitimacy hypothesis.

Why People Obey: Theoretical Observations on Power and Obedience in Complex Organizations

Recent sociological studies of power in organizations, although oriented toward practical ends, offer promise for a general sociological theory of power. Empirically grounded organizational studies examine social life as practiced by actors and preserve the tension between structure and action. Exchange theory and structural theories of power, in contrast, are abstract and theoretical; by asserting the primacy of structures (structural theories) or action (exchange theory), they cannot account well for the dialectic of human agency and structural constraint. We suggest the theoretical implications of organizational analysis and compare this perspective with traditional sociological approaches to power.

The Relational Origins of Rules in Online Communities

Where do rules come from in online communities? This study investigates how and why online communities adopt and change their rules. We conducted a grounded theory-based analysis of 40 in-depth interviews with community leaders from subreddits, Fandom wikis, and Fediverse servers, and identified seven processes involved in the adoption of online community rules. Our findings reveal that, beyond operational reasons like regulating behavior and solving problems, rules are also adopted and changed for relational reasons, such as signaling or reinforcing community legitimacy and identity to other communities. While rule change was often prompted by challenges during community growth or decline, change also depended on volunteer leaders’ work capacity, the presence of member feedback mechanisms, and relational dynamics between leaders and members. Our findings extend prior theories from social computing and organizational research, illustrating how institutionalist and ecological explanations of the relational origins of rules complement operational accounts. Finally, we build on these explanations to offer a set of design propositions that reflect the relational aspects of rules and rulemaking across communities’ lifecycles.

The Relational Origins of Rules in Online Communities

Where do rules come from in online communities? This study investigates how and why online communities adopt and change their rules. We conducted a grounded theory-based analysis of 40 in-depth interviews with community leaders from subreddits, Fandom wikis, and Fediverse servers, and identified seven processes involved in the adoption of online community rules. Our findings reveal that, beyond operational reasons like regulating behavior and solving problems, rules are also adopted and changed for relational reasons, such as signaling or reinforcing community legitimacy and identity to other communities. While rule change was often prompted by challenges during community growth or decline, change also depended on volunteer leaders' work capacity, the presence of member feedback mechanisms, and relational dynamics between leaders and members. Our findings extend prior theories from social computing and organizational research, illustrating how institutionalist and ecological explanations of the relational origins of rules complement operational accounts. Finally, we build on these explanations to offer a set of design propositions that reflect the relational aspects of rules and rulemaking across communities' lifecycles.

Norms: An Integrated Framework

Norms are a foundational concept in sociology. Following a period of skepticism about norms as overly deterministic and as paying too little attention to social conflict, inequalities, and agency, the past 20 years have seen a proliferation of norms research across the social sciences. Here we focus on the burgeoning research in sociology to answer questions about where norms come from, why people enforce them, and how they are applied. To do so, we rely on three key theoretical approaches in the literature—consequentialist, relational, and agentic. As we apply these approaches, we explore their implications for what are arguably the two most fundamental issues in sociology—social order and inequality. We conclude by synthesizing and building on existing norms research to produce an integrated theoretical framework that can shed light on aspects of norms that are currently not well understood—in particular, their change and erosion.

Social Verification Theory: A New Way to Conceptualize Validation, Dissonance, and Belonging

Academic Abstract In the present review, we propose a theory that seeks to recontextualize various existing theories as functions of people’s perceptions of their consistency with those around them. This theory posits that people seek social consistency for both epistemic and relational needs and that social inconsistency is both negative and aversive, similar to the experience of cognitive dissonance. We further posit that the aversive nature of perceiving social inconsistency leads people to engage in various behaviors to mitigate or avoid these inconsistencies. When these behaviors fail, however, people experience chronic social inconsistency, which, much like chronic rejection, is associated with physical and mental health and well-being outcomes. Finally, we describe how mitigation and avoidance of social inconsistency underlie many seemingly unrelated theories, and we provide directions for how future research may expand on this theory. Public Abstract In the present review, we propose that people find inconsistency with those around them to be an unpleasant experience, as it threatens people’s core need to belong. Because the threat of reduced belongingness evokes negative feelings, people are motivated to avoid inconsistency with others and to mitigate the negative feelings that are produced when it inevitably does arise. We outline several types of behaviors that can be implemented to avoid or mitigate these inconsistencies (e.g., validation, affirmation, distancing, etc.). When these behaviors cannot be implemented successfully, people experience chronic invalidation, which is associated with reduced physical and mental health and well-being outcomes. We discuss how invalidation may disproportionately affect individuals with minoritized identities. Furthermore, we discuss how belongingness could play a key role in radicalization into extremist groups.

Reconstructing the Social Construction of Reality

ABSTRACT What is the relationship between legitimation and institutionalization? We take a fresh look at a more complex and nuanced landscape than has previously been documented. Our approach is to view legitimation and institutionalization as separate, though related, processes. We engage in theory building to develop a typology suggesting four different ways in which the social construction of reality can be achieved: instantiating (mutual causal emergence, coming into being), realizing (legitimating toward institutionalization), aspiring (legitimating from institutionalization) and missing (mutual causal suppression, unrealized potential). Our typology contributes a new foundational framework for the sociology of knowledge for better explicating socially constructed reality, not only in periods of stability but also in the uncertainty of liquid times and states.

Opinion | The New Power Structure (Published 2018)

New organizations are forming and succeeding in an age of distrust.

Everyone Conforms, No One Believes: Pluralistic Ignorance in LLM Agent Populations

LLM-based multi-agent systems are increasingly used to simulate social dynamics, from opinion formation to collective decision-making. These simulations can reproduce certain social phenomena, but it is unknown whether they capture pluralistic ignorance, a state where a majority privately rejects a norm yet publicly conforms, each believing they are alone in dissenting. This phenomenon drives norm persistence, social movements, and political revolutions. We show that pluralistic ignorance emerges robustly in LLM agent populations. We construct a benchmark of 100 scenarios across 10 domains and 5 authority levels, grounded in the human pluralistic ignorance literature, and evaluate 8 models from 6 organizations. Agents publicly conform at rates of 64 to 94% despite privately opposing the norm. Conformity is domain-sensitive (workplace and social relationship scenarios produce near-universal public compliance) and highly model-dependent, though uncorrelated with model capability. We further test whether a single "norm entrepreneur" can break the false consensus by publicly dissenting. For 7 of 8 models, cascades succeed less than 26% of the time, with one model showing zero cascades across all scenarios. GPT-4o is a notable outlier at 48%, revealing qualitatively distinct social dynamics across model families. Our findings identify model selection as an unacknowledged degree of freedom that fundamentally shapes simulation outcomes. More broadly, the near-absence of cascades suggests LLM simulations may systematically overestimate the stability of social norms, missing the fragile tipping-point dynamics that drive real-world norm change in human societies.

How social norms emerge: The interindividual actor–critic.

The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight

The Misconception:  You celebrate diversity and respect others’ points of view. The Truth: You are driven to create and form groups and then believe others are wrong just because they are oth…

Social Norms

Social norms, the informal rules that govern behavior in groups andsocieties, have been extensively studied in the social sciences.Anthropologists have described how social norms function in differentcultures (Geertz 1973), sociologists have focused on their socialfunctions and how they motivate people to act (Durkheim 1895 [1982],1950 [1957]; Parsons 1937; Parsons & Shils 1951; James Coleman1990; Hechter & Opp 2001), and economists have explored howadherence to norms influences market behavior (Akerlof 1976; Young1998a). More recently, also legal scholars have touted social norms asefficient alternatives to legal rules, as they may internalizenegative externalities and provide signaling mechanisms at little orno cost (Ellickson 1991; Posner 2000).

Who Can You Trust?

Reprint: R1403K Success in business unquestionably requires some willingness to cooperate through having faith in others. The question is how much faith and in whom? Decades of scientific research show that people’s accuracy in deciding if another can be trusted tends to be only slightly better than chance. But this isn’t because trustworthiness is completely unpredictable. It’s because the guidelines most of us use to make these predictions are flawed. We place too much emphasis on reputation and perceived confidence, ignoring the fact that human behavior is always sensitive to context and can often be better assessed by our own intuition. So when your company’s money and resources are on the line, how can you do a better job of gauging trustworthiness and thereby improve your likelihood of success? This article draws on emerging research to show how trustworthiness works and offers four points to keep in mind the next time you’re deciding whether or not to do business with a new partner: Integrity can vary, power does corrupt, confidence often masks incompetence, and it’s OK to trust your gut.