Generally, there is more attention given to legitimacy problems at the level of particular governments than at the level of regimes as a whole. Alagappa's concluding chapter summarizes the volume's overall empirical findings. The requirement is for shared political principles or an ideology on the basis of which acceptable political institutions, procedures, and practices can be constructed. This is not to argue that shared political principles alone will be sufficient, but that this is a fundamental requirement for regime legitimation. These are sound and insightful propositions, yet they cannot allay the unease that one feels at the eel-like slipperiness of the phenomenon under investigation.
Problems of measurement are obvious and profound.
All too often, scholars are reduced to vague and unsubstantiated assertions that this or that government or regime does or does not suffer from legitimation problems. In all but a few cases, there are grave problems of empirical validity. Because they either endured or collapsed. To take a provocative illustration of this point, it is clearly the case that democratic regimes have proved quite enduring in much of the West. Whether working from a Weberian or a Marxist perspective, one could construct an alternative argument explaining the status quo in both places on the basis of the economic and political interests of the prevailing coalitions.