New Publication on the legitimation of private and public regulation

March 30, 2017

The Journal "Politics and Government" published a special issue on the legitimation of private and public regulation, edited by Peter Collin (et al).

Norm setting and norm enforcement are not exclusive domains of the state domestically or of interacting national governments internationally. This finding is well established concerning the present, but it also applies to the past. Now as then, we can find non-state actors who participate in generating and implementing norms and rules in non-governmental or semi-governmental organizational arrangements within as well as beyond the borders of the nation-state. They can be economic actors as well as social, religious and ethnic communities in various organizational forms. Norm setting and norm enforcement can be carried out in active cooperation with the state, or approved and mandated by the state, but it can also cross the limits of legality. Such questions have been researched from contemporary and historical perspectives, even though this kind of research is generally still nascent.

However, how non-state and hybrid regulatory regimes can be legitimized or how they legitimate themselves remains largely unknown. Two projects of the Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders”, one rooted in political science and one in legal history, have taken up this research question. Bringing the two projects together in this joint publication allows us to bring the respective debates into dialogue each other, to compare historical and current concepts of legitimation, and to reveal the diversity of legitimacy’s conditions and criteria as well as its sources and the tools for its creation.

The special issue is available online through open access.

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