Legitimacy Revisited: Disentangling Propriety, Validity, and Consensus

Recent research has conceptualized legitimacy as a multi‐level phenomenon comprising propriety and validity. Propriety refers to an individual evaluator’s belief that a legitimacy object is appropriate for its social context, whereas validity denotes an institutionalized, collective‐level perception of appropriateness. In this article, we refine this multi‐level understanding of legitimacy by adding a third, meso‐level construct of ‘consensus’,...