Why is government legitimacy important

International Political Science Review , 27 1. See document online Hurd, I. Legitimacy and authority in international politics. International Organization , 53 , — Kelman, H. Crimes of obedience: Toward a social psychology of authority and responsibility. Levi, M. Legitimating beliefs: Sources and indicators.

See document online Levi, M. Consent, dissent and patriotism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. But moral justification is only necessary, not sufficient, for political legitimacy, according to Simmons. The reason is that our moral obligations are to everyone, including citizens of other states, not to the particular state we live in. While there is no general moral duty to obey the particular state we live in, we may have a political obligation to obey if we have given our prior consent to this state.

The absence of a general moral duty to obey the state thus does not imply that all states are necessarily illegitimate Simmons Insofar as legitimacy, understood normatively, defines which political institutions and which decisions made within them are acceptable, and, in some cases, what kind of obligations people who are governed by these institutions incur, there is the question what grounds this normativity.

This section briefly reviews different accounts that have been given of the sources of legitimacy. While there is a strong voluntarist line of thought in Christian political philosophy, it was in the 17 th century that consent came to be seen as the main source of political legitimacy. The works of Hugo Grotius, Hobbes, and Samuel Pufendorf tend to be seen as the main turning point that eventually led to the replacement of natural law and divine authority theories of legitimacy see Schneewind ; Hampton Raz helpfully distinguishes among three ways in which the relation between consent and legitimate political authority may be understood : i consent of those governed is a necessary condition for the legitimacy of political authority; ii consent is not directly a condition for legitimacy, but the conditions for the legitimacy of authority are such that only political authority that enjoys the consent of those governed can meet them; iii the conditions of legitimate political authority are such that those governed by that authority are under an obligation to consent.

Locke and his contemporary followers such as Nozick or Simmons , but also Rousseau and his followers defend a version of i —the most typical form that consent theories take. Greene defends a version of this view she calls the quality consent view. Versions of ii appeal to those who reject actual consent as a basis for legitimacy, as they only regard consent given under ideal conditions as binding.

Theories of hypothetical consent, such as those articulated by Kant or Rawls, fall into this category. Such theories view political authority as legitimate only if those governed would consent under certain ideal conditions cf. David Estlund ff defends a version of hypothetical consent theory that matches category iii.

Authority, in this view, may thus be justified without actual consent. Estlund defines authority as the moral power to require action. Estlund uses normative consent theory as the basis for an account of democratic legitimacy, understood as the permissibility of using coercion to enforce authority.

Although consent theory has been dominating for a long time, there are many well-known objections to it. As mentioned in section 2. Other objections, especially to Lockean versions, are about as old as consent theory itself.

The attempt to legitimize political authority via consent is thus, at best, wishful thinking Wellman What is worse, it may obscure problematic structures of subordination Pateman In the utilitarian view, legitimate political authority should be grounded on the principle of utility.

This conception of legitimacy is necessarily a moralized one: the legitimacy of political authority depends on what morality requires. Christian Thomasius, a student of Pufendorf and contemporary of Locke, may be seen as a precursor of the utilitarian approach to political legitimacy, as he rejected voluntarism and endorsed the idea that political legitimacy depends on principles of rational prudence instead Schneewind ; Barnard Where Thomasius differs from the utilitarians, however, is in his attempt to identify a distinctively political—not moral or legal—source of legitimacy.

By thus distinguishing legitimacy from legality and justice, Thomasius adopted an approach that was considerably ahead of his time. Jeremy Bentham rejects the Hobbesian idea that political authority is created by a social contract. According to Bentham, it is the state that creates the possibility of binding contracts.

The problem of legitimacy that the state faces is which of its laws are justified. Bentham proposes that legitimacy depends on whether a law contributes to the happiness of the citizens.

For a contemporary take on this utilitarian principle of legitimacy, see Binmore A well-known problem with the view that Bentham articulates is that it justifies restrictions of rights that liberals find unacceptable. According to Mill, both individual freedom and the right to participate in politics are necessary for the self-development of individuals Mill On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government , see Brink ; Ten With regard to the defense of liberty rights, Mill argues that the restriction of liberty is illegitimate unless it is permitted by the harm principle, that is, unless the actions suppressed by the restriction harm others On Liberty , chapter 1; for a critical discussion of the harm principle as the basis of legitimacy, see Wellman ; see also Turner Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.

Many are not convinced that such instrumentalist reasoning provides a satisfactory account of political legitimacy. Rawls f and Jeremy Waldron f object that the utilitarian approach will ultimately only convince those who stand to benefit from the felicific calculus, and that it lacks an argument to convince those who stand to lose. Fair play theories offer one answer to this problem see Klosko and the entry on political obligation. Another answer comes from perfectionist theories. Raz tries to show how an account of legitimacy based on beneficial consequences is compatible with everyone having reasons to obey the directives of a legitimate authority.

For criticisms of this approach, see Hershovitz and , Nussbaum , and Quong His suggestion is that the justification of the state can be grounded in the samaritan duty to help others in need. Associated restrictions of their liberty by the state, Wellman claims, are legitimate.

An important legacy of consent theory in contemporary thought is manifest in accounts that attribute the source of legitimacy either to an idea of public reason—taking the lead from Kant—or to a theory of democratic participation—taking the lead from Rousseau. Theories of deliberative democracy combine elements of both accounts. Public reason accounts tend to focus on the problem of justifying political coercion. The solution they propose is that political coercion is justified if it is supported on the basis of reasons that all reasonable persons can share.

Public reason should involve only political values and be independent of—potentially controversial—comprehensive moral or religious doctrines of the good. This restricts the content of public reason to what is given by the family of what Rawls calls political conceptions of justice Rawls Rawls recognizes that because the content of the idea of public reason is restricted, the domain to which it should apply must be restricted too.

The question is: in what context is it important that the restriction on reason is observed? Rawls conceives of the domain of public reason as limited to matters of constitutional essentials and basic justice and as applying primarily—but not only—to judges, government officials, and candidates for public office when they decide on matters of constitutional essentials and basic justice.

A Rawlsian could reply, however, that the problem of legitimacy centrally involves the justification of coercion and that legitimacy should thus be understood as what creates—rather than merely justifies—political authority. The following thought supports this claim. Rawls—in Political Liberalism —explicitly focuses on the democratic context. It is a particular feature of democracy that the right to rule is created by those who are ruled. The political authority of the democratic assembly is thus entailed by some account of the conditions under which citizens may legitimately exercise coercive power over one another Peter ; Kolodny a,b.

Those following Rawls more closely will understand public reasons as reasons that attract a—hypothetical—consensus. On this interpretation, a public reason is a reason that all reasonable persons can be expected to endorse. The target of the consensus is either the political decisions themselves or the procedure through which political decisions are made. On a common reading today, the Rawlsian idea of public reason is understood in terms of a hypothetical consensus on substantive reasons e.

Quong On those conceptions, the use of political coercion is legitimate if it is supported by substantive reasons that all reasonable persons can be expected to endorse.

The problem with this interpretation of public reason is that the demand for a consensus on substantive reasons in circumstances of moral and religious pluralism and disagreement is that it either relies on a very restrictive characterization of reasonable persons or ends up with a very limited domain for legitimate political coercion. On this interpretation, the domain of public reason is limited to the justification of the process of political decision-making, and need not extend to the substantive as opposed to the procedural reasons people might hold to justify a decision.

For example, if the hypothetical consensus supports democratic decision-making, then the justification for a decision is that it has been made democratically. Of course, a political decision that is legitimate in virtue of the procedure in which it has been made may not be fully just. But this is just a reflection of the fact that legitimacy is a weaker idea than justice.

An alternative interpretation of the public reason account focuses on convergence, not consensus Gaus A political decision is legitimized on the basis of public reason, on this account, if reasonable persons can converge on that decision. They need not agree on the—substantive or procedural—reasons that support a decision. Instead, it is argued, it is sufficient for political legitimacy if all can agree that a particular decision should be made, even if they disagree about the reasons that support this decision.

Note that the convergence needs not be actual; it can be hypothetical. Accounts that emphasize political participation or political influence regard a political decision as legitimate if it has been made in a process that allows for equal participation of all relevant persons. Older accounts of this kind focus on democratic participation Pateman I:3 and Rawls f.

A democratic decision is always about the common good. In democratic decision-making, citizens thus compare their interpretations of the general will. If properly conducted, it reveals the general will. This is the legitimate decision. Active participation by all may not generate a consensus. So why would those who oppose a particular decision be bound by that decision? Since the democratic decision, if conducted properly, correctly reveals the general will, those who voted against a particular proposal will recognize that they were wrong and will adjust their beliefs about what the general will is.

In this ingenious way, individuals are only bound by their own will, but everyone is bound by a democratic decision. This section takes a closer look at the relationship between democracy and political legitimacy. In contemporary political philosophy, many, but by no means all, hold that democracy is necessary for political legitimacy. Democratic instrumentalism is the view that democratic decision-making procedures are at best a means for reaching just outcomes, and whether or not legitimacy requires democracy depends on the outcomes that democratic decision-making brings about.

Thomas Christiano helpfully distinguishes between monistic conceptions of political legitimacy and non-monistic ones. Democratic instrumentalism is a monistic view. It reduces the normativity of political legitimacy to a single dimension: only the quality of the outcomes a particular political regime generates is relevant for political legitimacy.

The contrasting position in contemporary political philosophy is that democratic forms of political organization are necessary for political legitimacy, independently of their instrumental value Buchanan What conceptions of democratic legitimacy, as I use the term here, have in common is that they demand that political institutions respect democratic values. Some such proceduralist conceptions of democratic legitimacy are also monistic. What is commonly called pure proceduralism is an example of a monistic view.

According to pure proceduralism only procedural features of decision-making are relevant for democratic legitimacy. Many contributors are drawn to non-monistic conceptions of democratic legitimacy. Such mixed conceptions of democratic legitimacy combine conditions that refer to the quality of outcomes of democratic decision-making with conditions that apply to procedural features.

Democratic instrumentalism is sometimes used to argue against democracy. According to arguments of this kind, some ideal of good outcomes, however defined, forms the standard that determines political legitimacy. If democracy does not contribute to better outcomes than an alternative decision-making procedure, it is not necessary for political legitimacy Raz ; Wall Those who defend instrumentalism take it as a premise that there is an ideal outcome that exists independently of the democratic process, and in terms of which the value of the democratic process, its legitimacy, can be gauged.

The instrumentalist accounts of Richard Arneson and Steven Wall , for example, refer to some ideal egalitarian distribution. In their view, the legitimacy of political institutions and the decisions made within them depends on how closely they approximate the ideal egalitarian distribution. If sacrificing political equality allows for a better approximation of equality overall, so their argument goes, then this does not undermine legitimacy. One problem with this view is that to get off the ground, it needs to treat the value of political equality as less important than the value of those other equalities that inform the perfectionist standard.

This is implausible to those who take political equality to be one of the most important egalitarian values e. Rawls ; Buchanan ; Christiano ; Kolodny a,b. In addition, democratic instrumentalism is at odds with the view that many democrats hold—that legitimate procedures of democratic decision-making create or constitute political authority.

Instrumentalist defenses of democracy aim to show that democratic decision-making procedures are best able to produce legitimate outcomes. The most famous version of this argument is based on the Condorcet jury theorem for a recent discussion, see List and Goodin In its original formulation, the Condorcet jury theorem assumes that there are two alternatives and one of them is the correct outcome, however defined.

Take the latter to be the legitimate outcome. The theorem says that if each voter is more likely to be correct than wrong, then a majority of all is also more likely to be correct than wrong. In addition, the probability that a majority will vote for the correct outcome increases with the size of the body of voters. Since democracy has a greater constituency than any other regime, the theorem gives an argument for why democracy is best able to generate legitimate outcomes.

In addition to arguments based on the Condorcet jury theorem, there are other attempts to defend the instrumental epistemic value of democracy.

Landemore , for example, offers an argument for the instrumental epistemic value of democracy that rests on the potential of decision-making mechanisms that bring together diverse perspectives to outperform decision-making by less diverse groups, e. According to pure proceduralist conceptions of democratic legitimacy, democratic decisions are legitimate as long as they are the result of an appropriately constrained process of democratic decision-making. These views place all the normative weight on the value of the democratic procedure.

There are several ways in which pure proceduralism might be understood. On an account of aggregative democracy—which takes the aggregation of individual preferences, for example through voting, to be the key feature of democracy—pure proceduralism implies that democratic decisions are legitimate if the aggregative process is fair.

Kenneth O. On a deliberative account of democracy, legitimacy depends, at least in part, on the process of public deliberation Manin , Bohman The idea is that while democratic deliberation helps sorting through reasons for and against particular candidates or policy proposals, and perhaps even generates new alternatives, the legitimacy of the outcomes of such a process only depends on the fairness of the decision-making process, not on the quality of the outcomes it produces. The justification for conceptions of democratic legitimacy of this kind is that there is no shared standard for assessing the quality of the outcomes—deep disagreement about reasons for and against proposals will always remain.

A fair way to resolve such disagreements is thus the only source of the legitimacy of the outcomes Waldron ; Gaus ; Christiano Estlund has raised a challenge against fairness-based versions of democratic proceduralism.

He points out that other decision-making procedures—flipping a coin, for example—also satisfy a fairness requirement. An argument from fairness is thus insufficient to establish the superior legitimacy of democratic decision-making. Pure proceduralists can respond to this challenge by pointing to the distinctive fairness of democratic decision-making procedures. Christiano and Kolodny, for example, argue that the legitimacy of democratically made decisions stems from the kind of political equality that democracy, and only democracy, constitutes.

According to Christiano , only in a democracy are people publicly treated as equals. According to Kolodny a, b , only a democracy offers the kind of equal opportunity to influence decision-making that avoids subordinating some to the decisions of others. The thought is that political legitimacy may be jeopardized not just by unequal access to political, social and economic institutions, but also by unjustified epistemic privilege.

What Peter calls pure epistemic proceduralism is a conception of democratic legitimacy according to which political decisions are legitimate if they are the outcome of a deliberative democratic decision-making process that satisfies some conditions of political and epistemic fairness Peter ; on procedural epistemic values, see also Peter Yet another response is to focus on the kind of freedom that democracy offers, rather than on egalitarian considerations. Pettit republican theory defends democracy as uniquely able to secure the non-domination of the citizens.

Rational proceduralist conceptions of democratic legitimacy add conditions that refer to the quality of outcomes to those that apply to the procedural properties of democratic decision-making. While pure proceduralists argue that the inevitable contestedness of standards that define the quality of outcomes makes it impossible to ground legitimacy in them, defenders of mixed conceptions are concerned that a fair process may lead to irrational outcomes—outcomes of unnecessarily and unacceptably low quality.

The general thought underlying rational proceduralist conceptions is that the fairness of the democratic decision-making process is not sufficient to establish the legitimacy of its outcomes. As is the case with pure proceduralist conceptions, mixed conceptions of democratic legitimacy also vary with the underlying account of democracy. The problem he poses is: are there methods of democratic decision-making that are based on equal consideration of individual interests and are conducive to rational social choice?

As is well known, his impossibility theorem shows a problem with finding such decision-making mechanisms. His view implies that democratic legitimacy only obtains if the outcomes themselves satisfy certain quality conditions—specifically, he postulated that they should satisfy certain rationality axioms.

The default conception of democratic legitimacy that many deliberative democrats favor is also a mixed conceptions. The legitimacy of democratic decisions, then, depends on both procedural values and on the substantive quality of the outcomes that these deliberative decision-making procedures generate.

In his view, only deliberative democratic decision-making can produce a decision everyone has reasons to endorse. Other deliberative democrats, while still pegging the legitimacy of democratic decisions to features of both the procedure and its outcomes, are more skeptical about the ability of deliberative processes to reach an ideally justified decision e. Gutmann and Thompson Pettit , ; List and Pettit ; List They show how occurrences of the discursive dilemma may undermine the rationality of the outcome of public deliberation.

This problem arises when the evaluation of alternative outcomes is logically connected to a set of independent premises. It is possible that the deliberative constellation is such that a decision made based on the evaluation of the premises will produce the opposite result than a decision based on the evaluation of the outcomes directly.

This can happen if participants will only endorse the reform if they endorse both premises and if only a minority does so—even though there are majorities for each premise individually. The potential irrationality of deliberative processes see also Sunstein is an important motivation for some democratic theorists to take into account epistemic features of democratic decision-making. Many advocates of epistemic democracy favor either an instrumentalist or a mixed conception of legitimacy.

As mentioned above, some accounts of epistemic democracy draw on the Condorcet jury theorem. According to this conception, a version of rational proceduralism, a democratic decision is legitimate if it is correct. His main objection is that accounts based on the Condorcet jury theorem fail to give a sufficient explanation for why those who disagree with the outcome of the democratic decision-making process ought to treat it as binding and hence demand too much deference from the participants of democratic decision-making.

Estlund , This is misleading, however, as pure proceduralist conceptions of legitimacy do not depend on procedure-independent standards. His conception of legitimacy is thus better described as a version of what Rawls calls imperfect proceduralism Rawls It assumes a procedure-independent standard for correct outcomes and defends a particular democratic procedure in terms of how closely it approximates these outcomes while allowing that no procedure can guarantee that the right outcome is reached every time.

It is a feature of an imperfect proceduralist conception of democratic legitimacy that a particular decision may fail to reach the ideal outcome—here, the correct outcome—yet still be legitimate. Political cosmopolitanism is the view that national communities are not the exclusive source of political legitimacy in the global realm.

This is a minimal characterization. It is compatible with a system in which nation states and their governments remain the main political agents, as long as there is some attribution of legitimate political authority to international conventions.

For even if states and their governments are the main political entities, there is still the question about appropriate relations among national actors. When should nation states recognize another political entity as legitimate?

And what are appropriate sanctions against entities that do not meet the legitimacy criteria? Let us call this problem the problem of international legitimacy. Political cosmopolitanism is also compatible with the much more demanding idea of replacing nation states and national governments—at least in certain policy areas—by global institutions. Examples of relevant policy areas are trade or the environment.

The associated global institutions may include both global rules e. This raises the question of what conditions such global governance institutions have to satisfy in order to qualify as legitimate. Let us call this the problem of global legitimacy. The more familiar, contrasting position is political nationalism.

It is the view that only the political institutions of nation states pose and can overcome the legitimacy problem and hence be a source of political legitimacy. Political nationalism is usually defended on the grounds that there is something unique either about the coercion deployed by states or about the political authority which states possess which needs justification.

Political nationalism has had much influence on debates on global justice. Some have argued that because moral cosmopolitan commitments trump commitments to national legitimacy, a conception of global justice can be detached from concerns with legitimacy Beitz a,b, ; Pogge Others have argued—again assuming political nationalism—that legitimate authority at the level of the nation state is necessary to pursue moral cosmopolitan goals Ypi provides an empirical argument.

Yet others have argued against the idea of global justice altogether, on the grounds that political legitimacy ties obligations of justice to nation states Blake ; Nagel What these approaches to global justice have failed to address is the possibility of sound political cosmopolitan conceptions of political legitimacy.

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