ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the notion of legitimacy, and relates it to other important notions, such as politics, authority and legality. Moreover, it distinguishes several sources of legitimacy that can be used to justify political decision-making in governance practices. The chapter considers the concept of democracy and how democracy legitimizes the way that a political community governs itself. It then break down the general notion of legitimacy by distinguishing input, throughput and output legitimacy. This enables us to formulate a number of norms for assessing the democratic legitimacy of governance practices. For instance, one criterion of input-legitimacy is the availability of opportunities for citizen participation. The chapter describes several models of democracy and shows that participation is valued and institutionalized in each model in different ways. Finally, it evaluates these models of democracy in terms of their strengths and weaknesses related to input, throughput and output legitimacy.
