The Populist Conjuncture: Legitimation Crisis in the Age of Globalized Capitalism
| Author | Malte Frøslee Ibsen |
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321718810311 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321718810311
Political Studies
2019, Vol. 67(3) 795 –811
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321718810311
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The Populist Conjuncture:
Legitimation Crisis in the Age
of Globalized Capitalism
Malte Frøslee Ibsen
Abstract
This article argues that the theory of legitimation crisis developed by Offe and Habermas offers
an instructive theoretical framework for explaining the current surge of populism across the
West. The article argues that this populist resurgence is indicative of a profound legitimation crisis
of the Western welfare state, which ultimately derives from its inability to control a globalized
economic system. The article argues that two prominent rival accounts of the populist resurgence
both suffer from their inattention to the specific ideational content of populism, as a reaction to a
form of elite political rule experienced as illegitimate. By contrast, the advantage of the theory of
legitimation crisis is that it is able to directly account for the structural conditions of the present
legitimation crisis. Finally, the article offers an integrative account of why populism tends to focus
on immigration in Northern Europe and on economic issues in Southern Europe.
Keywords
legitimation crisis, populism, welfare state capitalism, Jürgen Habermas, globalization
Accepted: 10 October 2018
Introduction
Western political life finds itself at a populist conjuncture with far-reaching political and
institutional consequences. The present surge of populism across the West has inspired a
thriving literature in political theory and political science on the question of how to con-
ceptualize populism, on the policies and conduct of populist parties, and on the threats or
possibilities posed by populism to liberal democracy. Yet scholarly attempts to account
for the factors responsible for the rise of populism in contemporary Western politics are
still relatively few and far between. This dearth of literature on the conditions of possibil-
ity for populism’s present success is curious, since the fact that populists are right now
ascendant in practically every Western liberal democracy suggests that these conditions
Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Corresponding author:
Malte Frøslee Ibsen, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5,
Copenhagen 1353, Denmark.
Email: mfb@ifs.ku.dk
810311PCX0010.1177/0032321718810311Political StudiesIbsen
research-article2018
Article
796 Political Studies 67(3)
are not merely local, but at least to some extent transnational in nature. The overall aim
of this article is to further our understanding of why populism is surging across the West.
In line with an older body of literature on populism (Hawkins et al., 2017), two of the
most prominent recent attempts to account for the present surge of populism across the
West point either to economic grievances, seeing it primarily as a reaction to economic
insecurity issuing from the centrifugal forces of globalization (Rodrik, 2018), or to cul-
tural grievances, equating it with a “cultural backlash” among certain sectors of the elec-
torate to the diffusion of progressive values in Western society over the last 50 years
(Inglehart and Norris, 2016). This article argues that both of these rival explanations
suffer from their inattention to the normative or ideational content specific to populism,
which can be understood as a political reaction or protest against a form of elite political
rule perceived as illegitimate (Hawkins et al., 2017; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017).
Populism’s ideational content suggests that the driving force behind the current surge of
populism is not reducible to economic or cultural grievances alone, but that these must be
understood as at least conjoined with or filtered through a distinctively political griev-
ance—namely, the widespread experience of a deficit or crisis in the legitimacy of the
political order—and that the present of surge of populism must in part be explained with
reference to this experience.
Pushing this argument further, the more specific aim of this article is to establish that
the theory of legitimation crisis developed by Claus Offe and Jürgen Habermas in the late
1960s and early 1970s offers a highly instructive framework for making sense of the cur-
rent populist conjuncture. The present surge of populism coincides with a historical decline
in political trust across the West, and the article argues that these phenomena are both
indicative of the fact that Western welfare states currently find themselves in a profound
legitimation crisis in Offe and Habermas’ sense. The article’s central claim is that this
legitimation crisis ultimately derives from Western welfare states’ effective loss of control
over economic life under conditions of economic and financial globalization: as markets
have become evermore globally integrated, welfare states have increasingly lost the ability
to submit market forces to political regulation, successfully manage economic crises, and
shield citizens from the negative social consequences of globalization—in effect, render-
ing welfare states structurally incapable of meeting the public demand for legitimation on
which the stability of the political order of the welfare state is predicated.
Furthermore, the article argues that this effective loss of state control over economic
life was dramatically actualized by the 2008 financial crisis, which is interpreted as an
exemplary case of what Habermas calls a “rationality crisis.” At the height of the crisis,
welfare states across the West scrambled to save the global economic system by pledging
massive quantities of public funds to prop up banks deemed “too big to fail,” thus over-
burdening public finances and laying the ground for years of public austerity and sclerotic
private sector growth. A growing number of citizens have responded to this rationality
crisis by losing trust in and withdrawing support from established political institutions,
parties and political elites, instead empowering populists whose very raison d’être is a
sweeping rejection of the ruling political establishment. The article thus suggests that the
populist resurgence across the West is rooted in a fundamental structural transformation
of the relationship between the state and the market, which has been affected by the glo-
balization of trade, finance and capital over the last 40 years, and which was at once made
manifest and greatly exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis.
Finally, the theory of legitimation crisis also offers a novel account of the fact that
populism has tended to focus on cultural issues and immigration in Northern Europe and
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