Overview
“Max Weber famously distinguished three ideal types of legitimate political authority: traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal. In the period 2016–2025, several political systems that were long considered consolidated rational-legal democracies experienced the repeated electoral success of leaders who are frequently described as possessing strong charismatic authority (and who often deliberately weaken or bypass rational-legal institutions and procedures).
To what extent can Weber’s tripartite typology still adequately explain the sources of legitimacy in contemporary ‘competitive authoritarian’ or ‘populist hybrid’ regimes? Or has the boundary between charismatic and rational-legal authority become so blurred in the 21st century that we need an additional or entirely different conceptual category to understand these cases?”
Possible sub-focus options (you can choose one or leave it open-ended):
a) Evaluate the argument mainly through the cases of Hungary (Orbán) and Türkiye (Erdoğan). b) Include at least one Latin American case (e.g. Bukele in El Salvador or Bolsonaro in Brazil). c) Focus primarily on leaders who came to power in established Western democracies (Trump, Meloni, Wilders, etc.)