The Meaning of Legitimacy in the Local Political Process

The principle aim of my article is to describe various concepts of legitimacy and their theoretical framework and to evaluate the possibility of their application in the local political process. The legitimacy of local political institutions can be perceived as one of the conditions of their stability and efficiency in relation to the rural development. The approaches and concepts of legitimacy of Max Weber, Luhmann, Tyler and Zimmerman and Zeitz are compared in the first part of article. To apply these classifications to local political institutions entails some theoretical and methodological problems, e. g. to distinguish legitimacy relating to communal politician from personal trust, ill-defined indicators of legitimacy, etc. Attempts to describe the single classification of the legitimacy of local institutions appear to be highly unproductive. On the contrary analysing various examples of legitimizing local magistrates and councils indicates that the communal legitimacy can be highly confused and can be based upon various sources of legitimation. One of the possible local legitimacy assesment is concept of the "systemic" and "sectoral" legitimacy. This approach also offers the identification of government's instruments for enhancing legitimacy. Another concept of legitimacy can be derived from case studies of Czech local political process. This pattern of legitimacy can be mainly detected in a some kind of "self-legitimizing" narration of communal politicians. Using theoretical approaches to the issue of "political narratives" (e.g. [12] et al.) it's possible to denominate it "narrative legitimacy".