The Role of Normative and Social Components in the Formation of Political Legitimacy

Political legitimacy in the ancient world was mainly normative in nature. But in the modern world, this concept, while maintaining some normative elements within itself, has found a deep connection with the public will and the demands of citizens. According to this, political legitimacy has a two-faceted nature that simultaneously reflects the normative and social characteristics of a society and creates the primary and secondary legitimacy of the system, respectively. In this article, with the qualitative approach and descriptive-analytical method, we explain the legitimacy of political systems based on the two normative and social foundations of legitimacy. The hypothesis ahead is that long-term continuity of legitimacy requires maintaining the distance between the two foundations of the legitimacy building of the system through continuous legitimization; in such a way that occurrence of crisis in the secondary legitimacy of the system does not cause the crisis to spread to its primary legitimacy.