Overview
Agre's analysis of institutional legitimacy, developed most forcefully in his 'wrapping up the election' post (January 2001), distinguishes between subjective and objective dimensions of legitimacy and uses this framework to analyze the Bush v. Gore crisis.
Subjective legitimacy: an institution is legitimate if its constituents regard it as legitimate. Government by the consent of the governed.
Objective legitimacy: an institution must also conform to norms of justice and rationality, such as the rule of law. No absolute authority exists to settle disputes about objective legitimacy, because any such authority must itself be legitimated.
Agre argued that the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore decision created a legitimacy crisis because the Court — the 'ultimate giver of law' — had shown itself to be lawless: issuing a poorly reasoned decision, refusing to let it serve as precedent (thus evading accountability), and applying equal protection reasoning in a way that was internally contradictory.
More broadly, Agre connected the legitimacy crisis to the conservative movement's systematic undermining of institutional legitimacy through irrational discourse (the 'new jargon'). He argued that institutions can only remain objectively legitimate if appeals to reason have any effect in society — making the degradation of public reason through propaganda a direct threat to democratic legitimacy.
Connection to Other Concepts
This analysis connects Agre's institutional analysis framework to his work on conservative movement analysis and the new jargon. It also anticipates his later essay 'What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?' (2004), which would argue that conservatism is fundamentally about aristocratic control of institutions — a thesis prefigured in the 'wrapping up' essay's description of Bush as 'an aristocrat who has inherited his office without the trouble of counting the votes.'