Trends and Perspectives in Discursive Legitimation Research

This chapter presents an analytical literature review of 107 research articles on discursive legitimation. Discourse plays an important role in the construction of legitimation. Numerous studies of discursive legitimation have been completed. However, few studies have reviewed relevant literature with a visual pattern, and a review that analyzes its trends is urgent. A bibliometric analysis using CiteSpace is applied to analyze relevant studies quantitatively and visually, followed by a close qualitative analysis to capture different classifications of legitimation strategies, main research methods, and hot topics. The results show that much attention has been paid to discursive legitimation strategies, and various analytical frameworks has been proposed, but most of the studies are conducted from the view of critical discourse analysis with van Leeuwen’s framework, examining political issues. It is hoped that the study will be helpful for future research.