https://fuldok.hebis.de/xmlui/handle/fuldok/14 2026-05-01T21:06:51Z https://fuldok.hebis.de/xmlui/handle/fuldok/833 Conceptualising Legitimacy: What to learn from the controversies related to an „essentially contested concept“ Wiesner, Claudia; Harfst, Philipp Based on a genealogy of the concept of Legitimacy, the goal of the paper is to develop a proposal that unites normative-theoretical and empirical approaches and hence reconciles two different conceptual-theoretical camps in legitimacy research. Legitimacy is a core concept in Political Science that relates to fundamental questions of politics, polity and policy–the relation between rulers and ruled, the properties of a political system, its democratic quality, the rule of law, and its policy output. However, in academia, no consensus has evolved on the conceptual and empirical core of legitimacy, it is still essentially contested. One main reason for this is that a concept such as legitimacy is not only a tool for analysis, but can also become an object of academic controversy itself, as researchers give different answers to key questions related to conceptualizing it. This is why academic controversies on a concept highlight key issues, questions and dimensions of understanding, defining, and operationalising it—which is also the case for legitimacy. The paper therefore recollects the main controversies around the concept of legitimacy since the 1950's by tracing a genealogy of legitimacy in the Social Sciences. A genealogy is a methodological tool in intellectual and conceptual history. Different from a classical literature review, a genealogy summarizes the main lines and traditions of thinking on a concept, the key controversies, predominant understandings, and crucial issues of conceptualizing it. In the conceptual debates on legitimacy in Political Science, the core controversy is the one between normative-theoretical and empirical approaches. Based on the genealogy, we develop a proposal for conceptualizing legitimacy that enables to reconcile the normative-theoretical and empirical camps in legitimacy research. 2022-10-28T00:00:00Z https://fuldok.hebis.de/xmlui/handle/fuldok/822 Doing qualitative and interpretative research: Reflecting principles and principled challenges Wiesner, Claudia Research in Political Science is increasingly based on qualitative and interpretative methods. Based on concrete experiences in a comprehensive qualitative interpretative study, this article discusses general challenges of interpretative methodologies and their application in Political Science. It fills a gap in the current methods literature by concretely explaining how the methodological presumptions of interpretative research are to be carried out in such a way that they lead to substantial findings, irrespective of the material, cases and method one choses. To do so, it is core to analyse not only the ‘what’, but also the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ in the material. A classical qualitative content analysis consists in analysing the ‘what’ in a text, a field, or a visual, that is, utterances, arguments, or concepts that are used in it. Beyond this, in a qualitative interpretative project, the second part of analysis targets the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of constructing meanings, narratives, arguments, topoi, or (mental) images. Analysing the ‘how’ and ‘why’ requires specific analytical and interpretative steps which are, however, barely discussed in the methods literature. Based on the experiences in a concrete research project, the article explains how to structure analytical steps for researching the ‘how’ and the ‘why’. 2022-10-28T00:00:00Z https://fuldok.hebis.de/xmlui/handle/fuldok/811 Actors, concepts, controversies: the conceptual politics of European integration Wiesner, Claudia The paper is a contribution to research methodology. It proposes a useful methodological import into the range of interpretative approaches in Political Science – the study of Conceptual Politics. Drawing on methodology and categories developed in Conceptual History, Conceptual Politics is understood as the political and rhetorical moves, strategies, debates and their actors, that coin, shape or reflect political concepts in both institutional and social reality and its perception, and with regard to their past and present meanings, understandings and practices. The main methodological premise and also the distinguishing trait with regard to other interpretative approaches is this analytical focus on concepts: A concept is a word or a cluster of words that functions as a nodal point in a political controversy. Concepts are socially constructed factors and indicators of the reality they describe, interpret and modify. Concepts have different layers of meaning that are studied in their temporality and historicity. The different, past and present, layers require the researcher´s prior knowledge and an interpretative approach. The article presents the theoretical and methodological backgrounds and premises of the approach of Conceptual Politics, its added value, the heuristic and analytical tools for analysing it, and the empirical application of the tools proposed. It is argued that the approach is especially beneficial in analysing European integration. 2023-10-03T00:00:00Z https://fuldok.hebis.de/xmlui/handle/fuldok/788 Challenges for comparative politics. Virtual conference of the DVPW-Section “Comparative Politics”, October 4th, 2021 Pluschke, Muriel Cathérine; Keller, Maria; Buchholz, Lea The 2021 conference of the research section “Comparative Politics” of the German Political Science Association was entitled “Challenges for Comparative Politics”. It took place digitally on the 4th of October, 2021 and was organized by Claudia Wiesner (Fulda University of Applied Sciences), Norma Osterberg-Kaufmann (Humboldt University Berlin) and Stefan Wurster (Technical University of Munich). In eight panels, the international participants presented their own research, received feedback on their projects and took part in lively discussions. They gathered input on how to overcome the challenges which come up in various topics of comparative politics such as formulating research questions after defining the focus of interest, finding the correct method of comparison, or developing the appropriate research design. Questions which were discussed ranged from the research process to methods in general to specific case studies and analyses. The daylong conference ended with a round table on the topic “Glossing over or zooming in? Beyond Western Monism in Political Science”. 2021-12-14T00:00:00Z