2026· Asian Survey· pp. 1-31· 0 citations· 52 references
Abstract
While governance performance is often regarded as the cornerstone of the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy, its capacity to sustain national identity among a generation socialized in prosperity remains a critical question. Challenging the assumption of a linear relationship, this article examines the mechanisms and limits of performance-based legitimacy through two novel studies. In a priming experiment with 652 high school students, exposure to images of China’s development achievements did not significantly increase national identity and in fact lowered students’ reported sense of responsibility. A second survey of 1,625 university students reveals an inverted-U-shaped relationship between evaluations of governance performance and national identity. The relationship is conditioned by equity values and attribution of development problems: governance performance most strongly reinforces identity when individuals attach high importance to social justice but also attribute developmental problems to the government. These findings reveal the fragility of a legitimacy model based solely on material outputs.
This paper critically investigates the cultural politics inherent in China’s pursuit of enhanced grassroots public cultural service effectiveness. Drawing on a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of 51 national demonstration projects, the study identifies four configurational pathways to effectiveness: resource-dependent, strategy-outcome oriented, process-driven, and comprehensive multi-dimensional types. These pathways correspond to varying regional resource endowments and development contexts. Resource assurance capacity emerges as a pivotal condition, but its significance extends beyond material support: it functions as a governance tool through which the state establishes administrative dependency, requiring localities to conform to standardized models in exchange for resources. This dependency, compounded by the state’s imperative to replicate “successful models,” systematically erodes endogenous cultural vitality. It does so through two mechanisms: standardized formats displace informal local practices, and communities’ capacity for autonomous cultural innovation atrophies. The findings illuminate a core tension: while the state strengthens governance capacity by incorporating local innovations into replicable models via resource control, this very standardization suppresses local variations and diminishes grassroots cultural distinctiveness. Theoretically, this study advances understanding of cultural governance by revealing how performance metrics function as technologies of “governance at a distance,” transforming complex cultural practices into calculable outputs while masking the political work they perform. Practically, it offers policymakers a diagnostic framework for recognizing when standardization threatens cultural diversity and provides guidance for designing tiered governance approaches that balance efficiency gains with the preservation of local cultural vitality.
Xi Zhang, Lian Ran· Humanities and Social Scienc...· 0 citations
This study examines the historical construction of journalistic legitimacy in China from 1872 to 2026 from an industry-centered perspective. While existing scholarship has largely focused on the lack of press freedom, the party-state media system, and marketization, relatively little attention has been given to legitimacy as an overarching analytical framework. To address this gap, this study proposes that the legitimacy of journalism in China is shaped by four interrelated dimensions: state, social, technological, and industry legitimacy. Using industry texts as the primary analytical entry point, this study employs qualitative textual analysis to examine how journalism defines its roles, responsibilities, and boundaries, and how it responds to and internalizes external expectations from the state, society, and technological change across different historical periods. The study finds that the legitimacy of journalism in China is not primarily produced from within the profession itself, but is continuously shaped by the interaction of state power, social expectations, and media technologies over time. As a result, although journalism in China has long possessed institutional necessity and formal legitimacy, it has struggled to sustain a genuine commitment to public service and professional autonomy, resulting in a structural paradox of being legitimate but not free.
This teaching case examines the challenge faced by Gael Trigueiro, executive leader of the Pacto pela Promoção da Equidade Racial (Pact for the Promotion of Racial Equity), a civil society organization (CSO) that brings together corporations, philanthropy, academia, and actors from the anti-racist ecosystem around the racial equity agenda in Brazil. Over just a few years, the Pact consolidated its engagement with major organizations, structuring the Racial ESG Protocol as a tool for driving corporate practices, generating data, and mobilizing affirmative action initiatives. Despite this progress, the initiative’s growth has begun to strain its organizational structure and its financial sustainability model. The case invites reflection on how CSOs can raise funds and expand their institutional capacity without compromising their independence, political legitimacy, or the trust of the actors that underpins the public credibility of their work.
H. P. Guornik, P. Mendonça, Guibson Trindade· Revista Brasileira de Casos...· 0 citations
This case examines the challenges of establishing and managing a civil society organization (CSO) dedicated to supporting youth living in vulnerable communities, with emphasis on financial sustainability, governance, and ethics. It follows Lucas and Rafael, two young residents of a low-income community, who found VOZ (Valorização de Oportunidades para Jovens – Advancing Opportunities for Youth) and, two years later, face the dilemma of whether tp accept a BRL 3 million public transfer conditioned on returning 30% to the sponsoring legislator as an illegal kickback. The case articulates the ethical, operational, and strategic dilemmas inherent in managing CSOs in socially vulnerable contexts, grounding the fictional narrative in the real mechanism of Brazilian legislative earmarks (emendas PIX) and their legal and reputational implications, thereby contributing to discussions on governance, transparency, financial sustainability, and accountability in CSOs.
Genivaldo Pinheiro dos Santos, C. S. S. Nascimento, A. Menezes· Revista Brasileira de Casos...· 0 citations
Sustainability has become a central concept in global policy agendas, corporate strategies, and civil society discourse. Yet, despite its ubiquity, the term often functions as a vague ideal, encompassing divergent-and at times conflicting-interests. This study addresses the critical gap in understanding how sustainability operates not merely as an environmental or developmental goal, but as a discursive construction that shapes political identities and power relations. Drawing on post-structuralist theory, particularly the works of Foucault, Derrida, Laclau, and Mouffe, the research investigates how sustainability functions as a hegemonic identity by marginalizing alternative narratives and securing broad ideological consensus. Employing critical discourse analysis, the study examines policy documents and public narratives from the European Union, the United Nations, and Turkey to trace how sustainability is articulated, institutionalized, and contested in different governance settings. The findings indicate that sustainability has evolved into an “empty signifier”-a flexible concept that unites diverse agendas under a common rhetorical umbrella. While this discursive openness facilitates global alignment, it also allows for co-optation, symbolic politics, and the suppression of transformative alternatives. Emerging critiques such as degrowth and climate justice movements reveal the fragility of this consensus and highlight growing resistance to technocratic and market-driven sustainability models. By situating sustainability within a broader field of ideological struggle, the study underscores its unstable and contested nature. Recognizing the discursive mechanisms that elevate sustainability to hegemonic status opens space for more pluralistic, democratic, and justice-oriented sustainability imaginaries. These insights carry important implications for rethinking policy frameworks and grassroots strategies in the face of ecological and political crises.
Elif Saracoğlu· Humanities and Social Scienc...· 0 citations
The current assault on the legitimacy, relevance and independence of higher-education institutions constitutes a systematic attack on the foundations of democratic society and the radical-liberal project itself. In essence, the social legitimacy and sense of public good of the university are being eroded, with weighty consequences for the future of the sector. To address this issue, this article proposes ‘outsides’ as a theoretical framework for reconceptualizing the university’s legitimacy beyond state-centred political imaginations. We theorize two interconnected forms of outsides. The first is political outsides, or spaces of engagement that generate thinking, action and accountability beyond state apparatuses. The second is university outsides, or solidaristic networks that generate transformative spaces to protect academic autonomy from corporate and managerial encroachment. We propose ‘outsides’ as a progressive and innovative social legitimacy ecosystem that positions universities as an ‘estate’ within democratic architectures, embedded in broader society networks rather than solely dependent on state recognition. This reframing offers pathways for universities to recover and reconfigure their academic autonomy while maintaining genuine accountability to diverse publics, ensuring that the ‘public good’ status of higher education is actively produced through relational engagement rather than assumed as a static institutional privilege. We argue that these outsides strengthen institutional autonomy and accountability, facilitating generative options for programmatic work and action in higher education. Finding ways ‘to think against the state that has no outside’, we argue that outsides have the potential to reframe the social legitimacy of the university in ways that may respond to the current challenges of the higher-education sector.
A. Keet, Daniella Rafaely· Europaeum review· 0 citations
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