Building global political legitimacy: how can we make global institutions more stable, effective, and justified?

Political legitimacy can make global institutions more stable and effective, and confer justifiability on their
power. But what is it for an institution to possess political legitimacy, and how can we design global
institutions to have more of it? Legitimate political institutions are not merely those that are morally justified,
or believed to be. Political legitimacy is something more specific. Drawing on insights from philosophy and
the social sciences, this project will provide a theory of legitimacy as a distinct kind of value concerned with
securing sociological preconditions for stable and effective collective political action. It will then apply this
theory to global institutions, showing how we can design them to be more legitimate.