What is political legitimacy? And why does it matter? What makes a democratic government legitimate? What happens when people feel a government is not legitimate? And how does legitimacy influence sense of belonging in a democracy?
In this TEPSA Explainer in collaboration with the ActEU project, Daniela Braun, ActEU’s Scientific Lead and Professor at Saarland University explains how political legitimacy works and what happens when citizens feel that their government does not represent them.
The ActEU Project has two main ambitions. First, it seeks to map and investigate persistent problems of declining trust, legitimacy and representation in Europe with a particular attention to the polarisation of societies and the EU’s multi-level structure. Second, it aims to craft tailor-made toolkits for political and civil society actors, school teachers and university lecturers to deal with issues of declining political trust in representative democracies in flux and counteract a further decrease.
