CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Chis, Diana-Teodora |
|---|---|
| Title | Legitimacy As A Naive Concept: A Moral Reasoning Approach |
| Summary | Do individuals construct moral justifications about why they need to obey authorities? This thesis seeks to explore whether laypeople (or non-philosophers) hold naïve theories about the concept of legitimacy, by combining a theoretical understanding of legitimacy – from a political philosophy and empirical studies standpoint – with a series of insights from the fields of cognitive science and moral psychology. I conduct an exploratory, grounded-theory research based on 20 semi-structured in-depth interviews, where I stimulate the production of moral and political statements and identify and analyze the emerging expressions of legitimacy. The qualitative data analysis revealed a preliminary structure for the identified expressions of legitimacy, including a set of core attributes and their possible continuous or categorical dimensions. Overall, while exploratory, the research suggests that individuals do construct moral accounts of legitimacy in the form of naïve theories, which could prove relevant both for the fields of political theory and empirical political research. |
| Supervisor | Meszerics, Tamas |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/chis_diana-teodora.pdf |
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