Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-r7xzm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T09:05:05.592Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - The Sky Is Not Falling: The Puzzle Solved

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

John A. Booth
Affiliation:
University of North Texas
Mitchell A. Seligson
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
Get access

Summary

We began this book with a puzzle, and we conclude by proffering a solution to it that works for eight Latin American nations. In Chapter 1 we wondered why so few advanced industrial democracies have broken down even though a raft of studies has both argued that legitimacy is critical for the survival of democracy and shown empirically that levels of legitimacy are declining in many countries. This anomaly between legitimacy theory and its failure to predict outcomes led us to speculate either that the theory has been faulty or partly so, or that the measurement of legitimacy has been at least partly faulty, or both. We set out to solve this puzzle by designing a research project that would, we hoped, allow us to understand the issues and point toward some clear solutions. In successive chapters we drew upon the work of others and added some ideas and findings of our own that allowed us to lay out partial answers to the puzzles. We conclude by reviewing what we have found (and how we have found it) so that we can, finally, offer our best solution to the legitimacy puzzle.

Our research design built upon but also differed from prior work in this area. Until recently most studies of legitimacy had been conducted in advanced industrial democracies. This does not reflect some sort of failure of the discipline.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Legitimacy Puzzle in Latin America
Political Support and Democracy in Eight Nations
, pp. 221 - 264
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×