ABSTRACT
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Legitimacy is a concept which relates to public authority. Max Weber’s ideal type of rational-legal legitimacy still is helpful to describe a modern type of legitimacy as opposed to traditional or charismatic forms of legitimacy. However, the concept of formal democratic legitimacy must be subdivided into phases according to the democratic process of arriving at decisions. Input-legitimacy indicates the preconditions for formal democracy, that is, the principles of fair democratic elections like one person, one vote; party competition; regular periodic elections; real opportunities for participation in voting; and interest articulation. As Fritz Scharpf (1999) has argued, democracy would be an empty ritual if it did not produce effective and problem-solving outcomes. Therefore, output-legitimacy should be seen as an increasingly important correlate of formal legitimacy. Finally, the forms and procedures by which input is transformed into outputs constitute a third aspect of legitimacy, throughput-legitimacy, which has been expounded, for example, by Niklas Luhmann under the heading of “legitimacy of procedures” (Luhmann 1969) or by Herbert Simon as “procedural rationality” (Simon 1978).
