In this article, I defend and expand on what I call the republican view of the Kantian state’s duty to the poor. Against minimalist sceptics, I argue that the republican view makes a compelling case for the state’s duty with conceptual resources internal to Kant’s philosophy of right. Against maximalist critics, I argue that the republican view need not limit redistribution to poverty relief and that it provides resources to overcome an important interpretative challenge facing attempts at justifying more expansive redistribution on Kantian grounds.

How did conflicting legitimation narratives in early modern East Asia coexist despite the tensions their mutually exclusive claims generated? Prevailing accounts understand authority to be legitimised through narratives emphasising hierarchical delegation or autonomous production. In practice, both existed simultaneously. Existing accounts in International Relations (IR) suggest conflicting legitimation narratives should produce instability at best and hostilities at worst. Yet conflicting narratives endured over the long term in this period. I argue conflicting legitimation narratives were performed by actors in early modern East Asia within separate locations, allowing contradictory claims around the nature of their authority to coexist. This is seen through the contemporaneous phrase wài wáng nèi dì or ‘emperor at home, king abroad’. To demonstrate this, I introduce the segmentation of space as a concept. Producing an inside/outside dynamic, East Asian actors performed their authority through autonomously produced legitimation narratives inside while acknowledging hierarchically delegated narratives as the basis for authority outside. I identify this process of segmentation operating at both the state and the region level. Both early modern Japan and Vietnam demonstrate how East Asian thinking and practices on spatial organisation were adapted across all levels of the system. Thus, conflicting legitimation narratives could endure without converging on shared understandings.

This article aims to explain the protean nature of the concept of “legitimacy,” arguing that its variability largely stems from denoting a quality of institutions that is both internally complex and sensitive to variations in institutional context. While this institutional-context sensitivity often leads to confusion and miscommunication, it is also what centers the concept’s meaning and use. To better understand legitimacy’s different forms of institutional-context sensitivity, and how they are interconnected, the article shifts from analysis and comparisons of concepts and theories of legitimacy to analysis and comparison of specific legitimacy arguments regarding specific institutions. It introduces a structured framework for analyzing legitimacy claims, beginning with the identification of the institutional level that the argument is directed at. This approach highlights how legitimacy assessments vary across higher and lower institutional levels—a crucial aspect of institutional-context sensitivity that has been underexplored in recent institutional legitimacy literature. The framework, comprising four steps of analysis and two supporting figures, advances our understanding of the complex nature of institutions’ legitimacy and underscores the importance of distinguishing between the legitimacy of an institution and the legitimacy within an institution. Throughout, the article illustrates the framework with examples drawn from scholarly debates on the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court.

The governance of farm animal welfare is led, in certain countries and sectors, by industry organisations. The aim of this study was to analyse the legitimacy of industry-led farm animal welfare governance focusing on two examples: the Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Dairy Cattle and the Animal Care module of the proAction programme in Canada, and the Animal Care module of the Farmers Assuring Responsible Management (FARM) programme in the United States (US). Both are dairy cattle welfare governance programmes led by industry actors who create the standards and audit farms for compliance. We described the normative legitimacy of these systems, based on an input, throughput, and output framework, by performing a document analysis on publicly available information from these organisations’ websites and found that the legitimacy of both systems was enhanced by their commitment to science, the presence of accountability systems to enforce standards, and wide participation by dairy farms. The Canadian system featured more balanced representation, and their standard development process uses a consensus-based model, which bolsters legitimacy compared to the US system. However, the US system was more transparent regarding audit outcomes than the Canadian system. Both systems face challenges to their legitimacy due to heavy industry representation and limited transparency as to how public feedback is addressed in the standards. These Canadian and US dairy industry standards illustrate strengths and weakness of industry-led farm animal welfare governance.

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.