Political Legitimacy and Normative Disorientation in European Liberal Democracies
Political Legitimacy and Normative Disorientation in European Liberal Democracies

Summary/Abstract: Legitimacy is one of the fundamental topics of the social and political sciences, as well as a valid issue in contemporary Western societies. Legitimacy is based on the existence of a common standard for evaluating social and political systems. If such a standard is absent, legitimacy is impossible by definition (Beetham 1991). The research question of this article is: to what extent is the level of a political system's legitimacy explained by the effect of normative disorientation? Data from round 5 of the European Social Survey is analyzed by multilevel linear regression models in order to verify hypotheses about the strength and direction of the correlation between political legitimacy and normative disorientation. Analysis showed that normative disorientation is negatively correlated with the level of political legitimacy.

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