Legitimizing Government through Discursive Strategies in Malaysian Politics.

The present volume comprises studies that focus on the concept of legitimation andits manifestations in language use. They examine relevant sociopolitical aspects asreflected in spoken, printed and digital texts in Malaysian political discourse between2008 and 2020. Legitimation is an essential element of any political discourse whichmakes this volume relevant both to a broad spectrum of scholars and the generalpublic.While there is no unitary definition of the concept, in most research the notionof legitimation is explained as a process of justification of a particular norm, beliefand/or performance by actors holding power and/or claiming authority. Legitimationis one of the core concepts in social sciences used in theorising political governance,that is, political authority and political order (c.f. Biegön [2016] for an overview).Drawing on Webers conceptualisation of legitimacy (2019), several dimensionsof legitimation are particularly considered in research studies: next to the attitudinal(people have to believe in the rightfulness of a particular legitimate order) andbehavioural (when they believe that particular order is legitimate, they can act inorder to comply with it) dimensions, one of the most important roles is attributedto communication (Schneider, Nullmeier & Hurrelmann, 2007). The nexus betweenpolitical communication and legitimacy is elaborated especially in theories of democracy(Otfried & Sarcinelli, 1998, p. 253; Sarcinelli, 2013, p. 93), which view thesetwo features of political discourse as mutually dependent. If legitimacy is conveyedfirst and foremost through communication, then it is language as one of the mostimportant means of communication that has to be included when analysing legitimationprocesses. At this intersection, political sciences and linguistics meet, callingfor a cross-disciplinary view on legitimation as "a political-linguistic concept" (Cap,2008, p. 22).