Democratic legitimacy and political support: recent innovations in the international debate

Abstract Recent phenomena related to the so-called crisis of democracies, such as populism and political polarization, have posed new challenges to research on legitimacy and political support. Faced with the recognized limits of the estonian model, since the 1990s, several authors have proposed new analytical perspectives to studies on the phenomenon. In this article, we present and analyze, in addition to David Easton's original conception, five recent perspectives that have brought relevant innovations to studies on political support. In the final part, the advances and limits of this literature for the understanding of some dilemmas of contemporary democracies are discussed, especially the growing support of the electorate in various countries of the world for candidates and parties with authoritarian political platforms.