Rational Legitimacy: A Theory of Political Support - Princeton Legacy Library

Publisher Marketing: This book confronts one of the central questions of political science: how people choose to accept or not to accept particular governments. In contrast to the prevailing view that citizens' decisions about the legitimacy of their governments are strongly conditioned by political culture and socialization and are hence largely non-rational, Ronald Rogowski argues that such decisions may indeed be the product of rational choice. The book proceeds both from recent work in the theory of voting and constitutional choice and from the older tradition of contract theory to postulate that decisions about legitimacy are really choices among alternative regimes. The author suggests that members of a society choose among these alternative regimes on the basis of a knowledge of ethnic and occupational divisions in their society. From these postulates a general theory is derived, which finds expression in numerous testable hypotheses. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Contributor Bio:  Rogowski, Ronald Ronald Rogowski is Professor of Political Science at UCLA. His book, Commerce and Coalitions, received the American Political Science Association's prize for best book in political economy. He is a former member of the National Science Foundation's Political Science Panel and a current member of the European Research Council Social Sciences Panel. He has given invited lectures at Bologna, Budapest, Barcelona, Konstanz, Mannheim and the Berlin Science Center (WZB) and is currently lead editor of the American Political Science Review.