Why legitimacy eludes : going beyond the procedural versus substantive distinction to explain legitimacy deficit in international organizations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper examines the concept of legitimacy, its different forms and the way it is related to conceptions of international society. It argues that the legitimacy of international organizations will decline if the relevant audience splits in its perceptions of what is legitimate. In cases where different members of the audience develop incompatible conceptions of legitimacy, institutional solutions to the resulting legitimacy crisis will have limited potential. In these cases, even procedural legitimacy may be out of reach because of fundamental disagreements over even the minimal terms of cooperation. The paper applies this theoretical argument to the case study of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (CHR, or the Commission) and its reform. It finds that the CHR’s legitimacy crisis was precipitated by the change in the normative environment of the international society after the end of the Cold War. As a result of this shift, some members of the CHR developed a substantive understanding of input and output legitimacy, while others promoted a neutral understanding of legitimacy. Because the Commission’s members held incompatible conceptions of what is legitimate and because none were satisfied with the status quo, the CHR’s legitimacy declined. Furthermore, institutional solutions to the legitimacy crisis in this case proved ineffective. Because the shift affected both input and output legitimacies, compromise even on strictly procedural aspects became impossible. As a result, the CHR’s reform did not address legitimacy concerns and the United Nations Human Rights Council suffers from the same “credibility deficit” (General Assembly A/59/2005, 2005) as the abolished Commission.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.064 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.034 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".