Explain the relationship between power, authority and legitimacy. (2018, 15 Marks)
Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan (Power and Society, 1950) called political science the study of the shaping and sharing of power. The three concepts explain how power becomes rightful, as a chain with a direction: power + legitimacy = authority. Run the chain backwards and authority decays into bare power.
The Three Terms
- Power is the capacity to secure compliance by any means. Max Weber defined it as the chance of carrying out one’s will despite resistance. For Karl Marx, political power is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.
- Legitimacy is the quality that makes power rightful. For Weber it is the subjects’ belief in rightfulness. David Beetham (The Legitimation of Power, 1991) demands three conditions: legality, conformity to established rules; justifiability, rules defensible by beliefs that rulers and ruled share; and expressed consent, through elections, oaths and participation. Legitimacy is not legality: Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws (1935) were lawful, yet no belief shared with the Jews they targeted could justify them.
- Authority is power acknowledged as rightful, obeyed as a duty rather than from fear. Weber classified it by the source of its legitimacy: legal-rational, traditional, charismatic.
How the Chain Works
Forward: legitimacy converts power into authority. Governments seek it through consent renewed at elections (from John Locke onward), performance in protecting rights and meeting needs, procedure such as the rule of law, and ideology. Antonio Gramsci explained why revolution never came in the West: the ruling class governs through hegemony, consent organised in civil society. Legitimacy thus limits power and also feeds it.
Arendt’s inversion. Hannah Arendt (On Violence, 1970) argued that power needs no justification… what it does need is legitimacy. Power arises when people act together. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy.
Backward: a legitimacy deficit strips authority down to coercion.
- Bangladesh: the opposition boycotted the January 2024 election, so expressed consent was thin. When a June 2024 court order revived job quotas, student protests met force; the UN human rights office later estimated that as many as 1,400 may have been killed, and Sheikh Hasina fled on 5 August. The February 2026 election, which brought Tarique Rahman to office, rebuilt legitimacy.
- Nepal: the September 2025 social-media ban and police firing brought down K. P. Sharma Oli within days, and the March 2026 election made Balendra Shah prime minister.
- India: the Emergency (1975–77) was legal in form but lacked shared justification, and the 1977 verdict withdrew consent.
A Critical Note
Weber’s belief-based account is circular: a regime that manufactures belief, as Steven Lukes‘s third dimension warns, would count as legitimate. Beetham’s test answers by asking whether consent could be withdrawn: free information, organised opposition, removable rulers.
Conclusion
Power is the raw material, legitimacy the transforming agent, and authority the product. Authority must keep earning legitimacy; when it stops, power is left with coercion, which, as South Asia showed in 2024–25, fails fastest when most needed.