Contested Legitimacy and Institutional Change: Unpacking the Dynamics of Institutional Legitimacy

Institutional legitimacy is often treated as a characteristic of an institution that generates authority, implying relative consistency across time and contexts. However, legitimacy is intrinsically relational and remains sensitive to changing political conditions and subjective perceptions. Introducing temporal and subjective dynamics of institutional legitimacy, this article applies greater conceptual precision to determining the role of legitimacy in shaping institutional change. It highlights how changing political conditions and subjective contestation over institutional authority routinely disrupts institutional legitimacy, resulting in cycles of institutional legitimacy in which institutions must navigate between pressures to adapt and obstructive disagreements over the direction and intensity of adaptation. The resulting conceptual framework provides insights into how institutional change is instigated, negotiated, and implemented that are missing from the current literature. I analyze the evolution of United Nations (UN) humanitarian intervention policy to elucidate how the dynamics of institutional legitimacy have shaped UN policy reforms since the Cold War and to illustrate how future scholars can tailor this framework to determine the extent to which legitimacy dynamics govern the trajectory of a variety of other international institutions.