The Organization of American States and the Dominican Crisis

In recent years political scientists have given increasing attention to the phenomenon of legitimacy, defined, following Richard Merelman, as the quality of “oughtness” perceived by members of a political system to inhere in the system's authorities and/or regime. The more the regime is regarded as morally proper and elicits generalized favorable attitudes from its constituency—i.e., is perceived to be legitimate—the more the members are predisposed to comply with directives of the authorities even when they are under no serious compulsion to do so or their own immediate self-interest does not so dictate.