This essay discusses Hun Sen's rise and longevity by examining the former Khmer Rouge battalion leader's emergence from the fall of Democratic Kampuchea in 1979 and subsequent steady consolidation of political power in the years since he took over as Prime Minister of the People's Republic of Kampuchea (1985–89) and the State of Cambodia (1989–93). The essay explores how he accomplished an autocratic coup de grâce by ousting political rivals and then attempted to forge autocratic legitimation via self-mythologization and appeals to royal imagery. Through these means and heavy-handed repression, Hun Sen today has come to hold virtually unchecked, unmediated political power over a country that is still searching for the truth in its fraught post-independence history.

The paper examines whether an institution has a differing impact on cooperation if it is introduced by a representative of the affected subjects rather than exogenously imposed. The experimental design controls for selection effects arising from the endogenous policy choice. The treatment varies whether the decision-maker is elected or randomly appointed. There is evidence of a large democracy premium in the sense that endogenously chosen institutions lead to more cooperation than identical exogenous institutions, but only if the group leader is democratically chosen. Especially the subjects who initially did not prefer the policy are more likely to cooperate if it was brought about by an elected representative. There is no democracy premium for randomly appointed group leaders.

What are the characteristics of a political protest that enable it to win public support, and what is the role of the political environment? The literature has argued about the characteristics that induce the public to sympathize with protesters (such as the identity of the protesters, their demands, and their methods), but little research has focused on the role of the political context, which includes the presence of other protests making different (or even opposite) demands, the contrasting identity of the protesters, and protest methods. In the research reported in this study, we focused on two protests that unfolded during 2023–24 in Italy (protests by environmental activists and farmers/livestock raisers) to investigate the impact of protesters' identity on public perceptions of their action's legitimacy, when two protests with contrasting aims but similar methods occur at the same time. We used a pre-registered randomized experimental design that manipulated the sequence in which a sample of respondents was presented with descriptions of protests by both groups. Our findings suggest that the sequence in which protests are presented significantly affect respondents' perceptions. Once primed with the evaluation of the farmers' protests, in fact, they perceive climate activists' actions as more legitimate. Our results suggest that people tend to comparatively evaluate social movements and to adjust their opinions accordingly when exposed to cognitively dissonant information.

The police are required to establish probable cause before engaging in custodial interrogation. Much custodial interrogation relies on a fraudulent epistemic environment (FEE) in which the police knowingly use deception and dishonesty to gain an advantage over a suspect regarding a material issue, injuring the interests of the suspect. Probable cause, then, is a sort of evidentiary and epistemic standard that legally justifies the police’s use of deceptive and dishonest custodial interrogation tactics that are on par with fraud. However, there are both deontological and consequentialist considerations that show why the police’s use of an FEE is often unjustified. Accordingly, the paper argues that even if the use of an FEE is based on probable cause, there are other (non-epistemic) reasons to think evidence with probative value (such as a confession) should be excluded when derived from an FEE and there is no acute threat of harm to others.

The presence of new religious movements (NRMs) is often fraught with tensions and confrontations. Depicted as foreign elements and “cults” they face opposition demanding to restrict their activities. NRMs in Israel, despite small numbers, raised concerns and objections, attributed among other things to the dominance and power of Orthodox religion. Gradually, however NRMs managed to establish themselves in Israel and to successfully deflect the opposition to their presence. In this work, based on interviews and media reports, we explore two strategies that enabled the movements in Israel to minimize rejection and opposition to their presence. The first, based on a republican concept of citizenship, included the adoption of Zionist ideology and taking part in settlement ethos and military service. The second, based on neoliberal concept of citizenship, fits well with more current trends in Israel, offers paths to economic advancement and social mobilization through education and ethos of success.

We study who perceives gains and losses in political representation in Rwanda and Burundi and why. We do so in the run-up to and during violence, but also in its aftermath characterized by radically different institutional approaches to manage a similar ethnic divide in both countries. We rely on quantitative and qualitative analyses of over 700 coded life histories covering the period 1985–2015. We find convergence in perceived political representation across ethnic groups in Rwanda, but divergence in Burundi, and argue how this relates to the postwar institutional remaking, legitimization strategies, and their impact on descriptive and substantive representation.

Amongst the ways in which American democracy is distinct, the Weberian anomaly stands out: the United States equates to a classical Weberian state with the routine trappings of bureaucratic power, national organization, stable territorial parameters, a legal code and military power. But it is at best a quasi-Weberian state in respect of state monopolization of legitimate violence. The scope of the Second Amendment means the federal government has control in many instances over the use of physical force but historically this authority coexists with the (explicit or implicit) delegation of political violence to societal actors. In this article I argue that the legitimation of political violence outside the state is endogenous to the American constitutional settlement, a feature which arises from the country's origins and the institutional arrangements adopted in key constitutional clauses and judicial decisions.

This paper seeks to understand modern comparative reflections on John Hart Ely’s work through Comparative Political Process Theory or Comparative Representation-Reinforcing Theory, and how such approaches can be augmented through the lens of therapeutic jurisprudence. It argues that the legitimacy of courts’ actions (or inactions) in such settings can be understood through their potential to strengthen democratic institutions rather than do them harm, acting as a re-set or recalibration of the democratic landscape. By buttressing representation-reinforcing approaches with therapeutic understandings, curial interventions designed to shift longstanding democratic impasses or blind spots are likely to carry much greater institutional legitimacy. By applying this lens to a series of case studies, the paper highlights the normative contribution that therapeutic jurisprudence can provide to representation-reinforcing action and to the design of such approaches.

Research on the legitimacy of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) continues to thrive, however, the vague distinction between descriptive and normative legitimacy seems to cause growing confusion. In our paper, we identify three problems in the literature on MSI legitimacy: lack of precision regarding which of the two forms is used; blurring of boundaries between them; and ambiguity of assessment when assessing MSI legitimacy with the help of fine-grained criteria. These three problems, we argue, are not only detrimental to construct clarity but they can also lead to an erosion of normativity, by which we mean the increasing lack of normative grounding or (unintentional) deconstruction of the normative elements of legitimacy. We introduce a framework that addresses these three problems, ultimately demonstrating how scholars can use the concept of MSI legitimacy in a manner that enhances construct clarity and avoids erosion of normativity.