The Leibniz Association funded a five-year Junior Research Group on “Sources and Consequences of Legitimation Strategies of Regional Organizations” (LegRO) at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg between 2018 and 2024.
The Research Group sought to map and explain the sources and consequences of legitimation strategies in regional organizations over time. It studied (1) how state representatives and regional organization bureaucrats justify an organization’s right to rule to relevant internal and external audiences; (2) why such discursive legitimation strategies may change over time and vary across organizations; and (3) whether and how they are related to institutional legitimation strategies. The Group’s research agenda consisted of a quantitative component that aimed to map and explain basic patterns in the discursive and institutional legitimation strategies of 29 regional organizations worldwide in the period from 1980 to 2019 and several qualitative components that sought to identify the causal mechanisms and political dynamics of legitimation and delegitimation in regional organizations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Publications from this research project include:
- Schmidtke, Henning, and Tobias Lenz (2024): “Expanding or Defending Legitimacy? Why International Organizations Intensify Self-legitimation,” Review of International Organizations 19(4), 753-784 [open access].
- Schmidtke, Henning, Swantje Schirmer, Niklas Krösche, and Tobias Lenz (2024): “The Legitimation of International Organizations: Introducing a New Dataset,” International Studies Perspectives 25(1), 86-110 [open access].
- Lenz, Tobias, and Fredrik Söderbaum (2023): “The Origins of Legitimation Strategies in International Organizations: Agents, Audiences and Environments,” International Affairs 99(3), 899-920 [open access].
- Lenz, Tobias, and Henning Schmidtke (2023): “Agents, Audiences, and Peers: Why International Organizations Diversify their Discursive Legitimation,” International Affairs 99(3), 921-940 [open access].
- Iroulo, Lynda C. and Tobias Lenz (2022): “Global Theories of Regionalism,” In Jürgen Rüland and Astrid Carrapatoso (eds.) Handbook on Global Governance and Regionalism. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 36–51.
- Hall, Stephen, Tobias Lenz, and Anastassia Obydenkova (2022): “Environmental Commitments and Rhetoric over the Pandemic Crisis: Social Media and Legitimation of the AIIB, the EAEU, and the EU,” Post-Communist Economies 34(5), 577-602.
Some working papers in this project are the following:
- “The democratic self-legitimation of international organizations.” With Henning Schmidtke. Last presented at ISA 2023.
- “Institutional overlap and the legitimation of international organizations.” With Swantje Schirmer and Henning Schmidtke.