Taisu Zhang, Yale Law School, has posted an important, and for Americanists at least, unfortunately timely paper, Legality and Legitimacy in Authoritarian Regimes:
Conventional legal and political theory tend to assume that authoritarian regimes have an inherently uneasy relationship with law: that strong legal systems functionally constrain the uninhibited exercise of power sought by authoritarian regimes. Operating under the shadow of this assumption, attempts at explaining how authoritarian regimes might employ law and legality to bolster their own legitimacy tend to emphasize legality's instrumental capacity to render governmental activity more predictable to private parties, perhaps through the protection of property rights or civil liberties. Citizens who desire such predictability would therefore reward a self-constraining authoritarian regime with greater legitimacy. Within this framework, the abstract idea of "authoritarianism" and legality are still very much at odds with each other, but authoritarian regimes do not always want to indulge their own authoritarianism. This mechanism, while important, is incomplete. Large, stable autocracies with a high level of administrative sophistication may find that their desire for social and bureaucratic control is, in fact, better served by law and legality than by any other governance technology. Recent studies suggest that citizens of these regimes may respond positively towards law and legality-by conveying greater amounts of perceived legitimacy upon the regime-even when it is not connected to the constraining effects mentioned above. This chapter therefore argues that legality can, under certain ideological and sociological circumstances, be a very useful source of sociopolitical legitimacy even for authoritarian regimes that wish to escalate their authoritarianism.--Dan Ernst
