Please join socPIE for a presentation by Dr. Eric Schoon, Assistant Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University. Abstract and zoom details below.
Title: "Operationalizing Legitimacy."
Abstract: Legitimacy is widely invoked as a condition, cause, and outcome of other social phenomena, yet measuring legitimacy is a persistent challenge. This article synthesizes existing approaches to conceptualizing legitimacy across the social sciences to identify widely agreed upon definitional properties, and builds on these points of consensus to develop a framework for operationalization. Legitimacy implies specific relationships among three empirical elements: an object of legitimacy, an audience that confers legitimacy, and a relationship between the two that is defined by mutual expectations. Together, these empirical elements constitute a dyad (i.e., a single unit consisting of two nodes and a tie). I detail how legitimacy (and illegitimacy) can be empirically established by accounting for the ways that elements of the dyad interact, and elaborate the advantages of approaching the measurement of legitimacy in this way. Followed to its logical conclusion, this operationalization has important implications for understanding the effects of legitimacy. I conclude by discussing these implications and how they stand to inform debates over the importance of legitimacy for explaining socially significant outcomes.
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https://osu.zoom.us/j/98973629567?pwd=bE10czhNVGdhTzBiMHp0c2Z0VGFUQT09
Meeting ID: 989 7362 9567
Password: 381226
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