Legitimacy: Ambiguities Of Political Success Or Failure In East And Southeast Asia

This book documents the bases for a new view of legitimacy in general and in various parts of Asia, including China, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. The authors see legitimacy anywhere as always partial, rather than total, and somewhat measurable. Legitimacy is specifically political, rather than more vaguely socioeconomic. It can be a predicate of various sizes of collectivity, not just of a sovereign government, or of policies, or of leaders. It can be challenged by patriotism. Legitimacy derives not just from scientific norms or technocracy, even in modern times. It is a belief whose alternative (illegitimacy) people may often suppress in their minds until external situations change, bringing an unexpected cascade of altered legitimacy. The volume is edited by Lynn White, a professor in the Woodrow Wilson School and Politics Department at Princeton. It throws light not only on modern changes of the process of political legitimization, but also on the correlates of that process in specific East and Southeast Asian countries.