Abstract:

According to J. Gerschewski (2013, p. 29), legitimacy, along with co-optation and repression, constitute the three essential pillars of autocratic regime stability, and explaining the mechanisms of sustainability should take into account the complex relationship between the mentioned variables. As he points out, legitimacy significantly reduces the costs of persuasion undertaken by elites against the apparatus and the public, and reduces the likelihood of the emergence of personal alternatives to those in power.

The concept of legitimacy is particularly useful for explaining the sources of political stability of Central Asian regimes, both those that have never embarked on the path of democratization and those that remain in a hybrid space, where formal democratic institutions (e.g., competitive elections) (Diamond, 2002; Levitsky, Way, 2010), are modified to a greater or lesser extent by informal practices designed to secure the power of those in power (e.g., by restricting voting rights, media freedom, or persecuting the opposition). Mechanisms of repression, or co-optation, are insufficient to explain the phenomenon of the persistence of Central Asian authoritarianisms, and they fail to account for a range of legitimizing activities of non-democratic elites aimed at justifying the existing order. Focusing on repressive mechanisms also makes it difficult to understand why authoritarian rulers choose to bear the costs associated with institutionalizing persuasion.

The task of this text is to analyze selected conditions of effectiveness and mechanisms of legitimacy in authoritarian states, based on examples from Central Asian countries. Focusing attention on the legitimacy claims formulated by the political elites of non-democratic states does not mean assuming that their actions are always effective. It is about the weaker claim that they are relevant to the reproduction of non-democratic regime stability, so they are not just propaganda messages. The speech will point to several dimensions of the effectiveness of the legitimization of power and its mechanisms: control of those who formulate claims that undermine the official legitimacy formula, basing legitimacy on dichotomous divisions, shaping perceptions of legitimacy, authoritarian establishment and limitation of the agenda, the interactive nature of legitimacy, controlling the definition of the situation, stable support of a relatively narrow circle of supporters.