Although the burgeoning discipline of welfare economics is based on essentially utilititarian principles, the foundations of utilitarianism have received little attention in recent years. This paper seeks to reopen the debate by drawing a distinction between Harsanyi’s two defences of utilitarianism, labeling the first a teleological or ideal-observer theory, and the second a nonteleological th...

Systematic analyses of the political effectiveness of involving employee and employer associations in public policy making via social pacts in terms of one central alleged function, i.e. raising political legitimacy, are lacking. The aim of this article is to assess the impact of involving employee and employer associations in public policy and their political effects. As regards the assessment...

Power, rule, and legitimacy have always been core concerns of political science. In the 1970s, when governability appeared to be problematic, legitimacy was discussed both in the context of policy research and by critics of the capitalist state. More recently interest turned to governance beyond the nation-state. The legitimacy of transnational (i.e., European and international) organizations, ...

This paper opens the ‘black box’of political legitimacy and asks what role, if any, it played in the transformation of pre-modern England’s political system to one based on representation and the rule of law. Accordingly, the paper first presents a theory of endogenous legitimacy and why it influences the distribution of political power and thus policies, institutions, and outcomes. Applying th...