Legitimacy is always a ‘social construct’. (Answer in 150 words)

- Legitimacy is always a ‘social construct’. (Answer in 150 words)
Introduction
Legitimacy is the belief that power is rightful, and beliefs are made rather than found. To that extent the claim holds, but it collapses into relativism unless legitimacy can also be judged against standards the believers themselves hold.

Body
1. Weber's empirical turn: legitimacy is belief in the validity of an order, sustained through three pure types — traditional, charismatic and legal-rational. Rightness becomes whatever the ruled accept.
2. Constructed and historical: divine right once legitimised what elections legitimise now; Berger and Luckmann show institutional orders justified after the fact, and Gramsci shows hegemony manufacturing consent through civil society.
3. Beetham's correction: The Legitimation of Power (1991) requires conformity to rules, justification of those rules by shared beliefs, and expressed consent — criteria against which a regime can actually fail.
4. Habermas' rational test: Legitimation Crisis (1973) grounds legitimacy in reasons that could survive undistorted discourse, not in whatever the system contrives to produce.

Conclusion
Legitimacy is constructed in content and variable in form, yet not arbitrary. Beetham's dimensions let us say that a regime is believed legitimate and is nonetheless not.