Scholars have studied legitimacy creating but barely studied delegitimation in stable democracies

Evidence

Max Weber’s 1919 treatise on politics as a vocation has long been a touchstone for thinking about political legitimacy. The types of legitimacy and conditions for creating legitimate authority are well studied. Delegitimation, however, especially in presumptively stable, wealthy democracies, is barely studied at all. Here we are on our own, confronting the unanticipated alien force we call the new conspiracism. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 46

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claimed scholarly gap on delegitimation is worth checking against the literature on legitimacy crises and institutional erosion.