ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the use of metaphorical language in a particularly important segment of political communication, discourses on the legitimacy of political orders. It argues that such discourses play a crucial and so far largely neglected role – with metaphors serving as key resources – in the (re-) production of legitimacy. Debates on legitimacy have been characterised by the cyclical return of crisis diagnoses. A glance at the literature suggests that we are in the midst of the latest cyclical peak: despite the conspicuous lack of normatively plausible alternatives to democratic government, and despite the presumptive global triumph of liberal democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, scepticism prevails today when the legitimacy of political orders in the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is assessed (Nye et al. 1998; Pharr and Putnam 2000; Dalton 2004). Whereas older variations on the crisis theme focused on the internal flaws and contradictions of representative democracy and capitalism, globalisation now tends to be identified as the main culprit for the alleged erosion of democratic quality and legitimacy (Zürn 2004). A more sanguine view rejects the dominant erosion-of-legitimacy hypothesis, positing instead that the globalisation-induced transformation or emergence of national and international governance arrangements has coincided with the rise of new foundations of legitimacy, a shift from democratic and input-oriented to output-based criteria of legitimation (Scharpf 1999). Yet such a development may itself be interpreted as a crisis signal.
