E2 Belief systems and legitimizing narratives

Topic

A society’s ideological field encompasses the institutions that generate meaning and the degree of cohesion those institutions manage to sustain between the official narrative they offer and the population’s lived experience. As long as the legitimacy gap—the distance between the official narrative and the population's lived experience—remains contained, these meaning-generating institutions maintain a high degree of cohesion within the ideological field.

The legitimacy gap is the variable that triggers changes in the ideological field: its sustained growth erodes consensus—that is, it reduces the degree of cohesion that meaning-generating institutions manage to maintain between the official narrative and the population's lived experience. The wider the legitimacy gap grows, the less the official narrative suffices to explain what the population actually experiences, and the more the consensus underpinning the ideological field weakens.

It is this same legitimacy gap that, if it grows enough to create space for alternative narratives, fuels the fragmentation of the narrative landscape; and, if it suddenly crosses a critical threshold, triggers a breakdown in legitimacy. Therefore, monitoring the legitimacy gap—rather than merely the degree of cohesion within the ideological field at any given moment—is the way to anticipate both the fragmentation of the narrative landscape and the breakdown of legitimacy, before the ideological field itself has fractured.

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