Why is political legitimacy important

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.

Hassoun takes this issue as her starting-point. She argues that the coercive power of global governance institutions raises a legitimacy problem of its own and, turning the arguments of Blake and Nagel on their heads, that securing the legitimacy of those institutions entails obligations of global justice. There are two main approaches to both international and global legitimacy: the state-centered approach and the people-centered approach.

The former takes appropriate relations among states as basic. Locke, Bentham, and Mill, among others, approached the issue of international legitimacy in this way.

Among contemporary thinkers, Michael Walzer , defends a state-based—or as he calls it—community-based approach. The most important criterion of international legitimacy that he proposes is the criterion of non-interference.

Others have put forward conceptions based on state consent. Buchanan ; Wenar ; Cavallero The second approach takes features of individuals—their interests or their rights—as basic for legitimacy. As mentioned above section 2. Specifically, political legitimacy requires that a minimal standard of justice is met. On the basis of this moralized conception of legitimacy, Buchanan argues against the state-based conception and against state consent theories of legitimacy in particular.

State consent, Buchanan claims, is neither necessary nor sufficient for legitimacy. It is not sufficient because it is well-known that states tend to be the worst perpetrators in matters of human rights and there is thus need for an independent international standard of minimal justice to obtain legitimacy. It is not necessary, because international law recognizes many obligations as binding even without the consent of acting governments.

As long as these obligations are compatible with the minimal standard of justice, they are legitimate even if they have arisen without state consent. Buchanan also rejects the idea that the source of a legitimacy deficit at the international level is the inequality among states.

He does not believe that states need to have equal weight in international institutions. The more efficient remedy for this problem, he argues, is protecting basic human rights and improving democratic accountability. Buchanan uses his conception of legitimacy to answer the question when a political entity—as formed, for example, by secession or by union—should be recognized as legitimate. He lists three criteria Buchanan ff. It specifies how political entities should treat those upon whom it wields political power.

Specifically, it requires that basic human rights are protected. This requirement includes a demand for minimal democracy. But not all political entities that satisfy this requirement deserve to be recognized as legitimate. They also need to be formed in the right way. It contains conditions about how political entities should interact with one another. The more fundamental question, she argues, is what makes the constitution of a people legitimate.

And it would be a mistake to think that the constitution of a people is a historical issue or an empirical given. What makes the constitution of a people legitimate is a normative question in its own right that must be asked before we can ask about the legitimacy of the government of a people.

What is the scope for legitimate border controls? Do states have a unilateral right to control their borders or do potential immigrants have a right to participate in the determination of immigration policies? His key claim is that state borders are coercive to potential immigrants. In light of this, and because, in a democracy, the exercise of coercive political power requires some form of democratic justification, he concludes that both citizens and foreigners should have say in the determination of border policies.

See Miller for a critical discussion of this argument. Conceptions of global legitimacy broaden the scope of legitimate authority to global governance institutions.

One of the precursors of global legitimacy is Kant. This conception, while stopping short of requiring a single world state, confers more coercive political power to the global level than the league of nations, which essentially leaves untouched the sovereignty of nation states.

The philosophical literature on global legitimacy is very much work in progress. But most proposals favor a multilevel system of governance in which global legitimacy is to be achieved through an appropriate division of labor between nation states and issue-specific global governance institutions e.

Caney ; Valentini Any successful theory of global legitimacy has to cover the following three issues. First, what are global governance institutions and in what ways can and should they be thought of as taking over roles from states or their governments? This is a question about the subject of global legitimacy Hurrell and MacDonald Second, what is the legitimacy problem that such governance institutions face? And, third, how can they solve this problem of legitimacy and what are legitimacy criteria that apply to them?

How, if at all, do these criteria differ from those that apply at the level of nation states? These institutions are set up to handle certain issues in similar fashion as national political agencies would. Just like national political institutions, they are coordination devices.

Only they are created to solve problems that arise at the global level. Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel have a slightly broader account of global governance institutions—one that is not limited to them being coordination devices, but that emphasizes coercion instead. To overcome this problem, they argue, new modes of governance must be created, with their own structures of accountability.

These structures are necessary to properly deal with the coercive power that these institutions exercise. Buchanan and Keohane agree that the attempt to rule without legitimacy is an unjustified exercise of power. They also argue that the attempt to rule without legitimacy raises not only a normative problem, but has direct practical consequences, as institutions that appear unjustified will not be effective.

The problem of legitimacy that global governance institutions face is that even when there is widespread agreement that global institutions that can take on the role of co-ordination devices are necessary, there will be widespread disagreement about which particular institutions are necessary and what rules they should issue Buchanan and Keohane ff.

An important question for political cosmopolitanism is to what extent international and global legitimacy require democracy—either at the level of national states and governments or at the level of global governance institutions. Many writers on the subject have tended to take a cautiously positive stance on this issue e.

Beitz, , ; Held , ; Buchanan ; Buchanan and Keohane An exception is Rawls in The Law of Peoples , however, who advocates a conception of international legitimacy that demands that peoples and their states are well-ordered, but does not associate well-orderedness with democracy. There are two worries that tend to underlie the cautious attitude. One is feasibility: it is often argued that democracy at the international level, let alone at the level of global governance institutions, is utopian and cannot be realized.

The second worry is of a moral nature: democracy should not be imposed on people and peoples who endorse a different set of values see Valentini for a discussion. In response to the second worry, Christiano argues that a human right to democracy is compatible with a right to self-determination and that, properly understood, the right to self-determination presupposes the human right to democracy. His intrinsic argument for a human right to democracy builds on an argument discussed earlier section 4.

Cohen and Sabel seek to rescue an ideal of global democracy from more skeptical tendencies in the literature. They respond to these considerations by advocating a notion of global democracy that emphasizes the deliberative aspect. Granting to skeptics that democratic decision-making mechanisms might be problematic for both feasibility reasons and moral reasons, they argue that some form of deliberation is primarily what is needed to address the legitimacy deficit that global governance institutions face see also Appiah ; List and Koenig-Archibugi I would like to thank Thomas Pogge and Laura Valentini for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Descriptive and Normative Concepts of Legitimacy 2. The Function of Political Legitimacy 2. Sources of Political Legitimacy 3. Political Legitimacy and Democracy 4. Legitimacy and Political Cosmopolitanism 5.

The Function of Political Legitimacy This section lays out the different ways in which legitimacy, understood normatively, can be seen as relating to political authority, coercion, and political obligations. Sources of Political Legitimacy 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.

Political Legitimacy and Democracy This section takes a closer look at the relationship between democracy and political legitimacy. Legitimacy and Political Cosmopolitanism Political cosmopolitanism is the view that national communities are not the exclusive source of political legitimacy in the global realm. Bibliography Abizadeh, Arash, Anscombe, G. Appiah, Anthony, Cosmopolitanism , London: Penguin. Applbaum, Arthur, Arendt, Hannah, Arrow, Kenneth, Barnard, Frederick M.

Beetham, David, The Legitimation of Power , Basingstoke: Palgrave. Beitz, Charles, a. Benhabib, Seyla, Bentham, Jeremy, []. Binmore, Ken, Putterman eds. Blake, Michael, Bohman, James, Brink, David, Buchanan, Allen, Buchanan, Allen and Robert O.

Keohane, Byrd, B. Sharon and Joachim Hruschka, Caney, Simon, Cavallero, Eric, Christiano, Thomas, Matthew Liao, and Massimo Renzo eds. Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. Cohen, Joshua, a. Reprinted from Democracy and Difference , Seyla Benhabib ed. Cohen, James and Charles Sabel, Dahl, Robert A. Dworkin, Ronald, Edmundson, William A.

Enoch, David, Estlund, David, Flikschuh, Katrin, Gaus, Gerald F. Goodin, Robert, Green, Leslie, Greene, Amanda, Grofman, Bernard and Scott L. Feld, Gutmann, Amy and Dennis Thompson, Communication and the Evolution of Society , transl. Boston: Beacon Press. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action , transl. Cambridge: MIT Press. Between Facts and Norms , Transl. Hampton, Jean, Political Philosophy , Boulder: Westview Press.

Hassoun, Nicole, Held, David, Hershovitz, Scott, Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan , edited by Edwin Curley, Indianapolis: Hackett, Horton, John, Hume, David, Alasdair MacIntyre. London: University of Notre Dame Press, Hurrell, Andrew and Terry Macdonald, Kant, Immanuel, Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klosko, George, []. Knight, Jack and James Johnson, Kolodny, Niko, a.

Korsgaard, Christine, List, Christian, List, Christian and Robert Goodin, Parts of Indian Constitution. First it creates a national government consisting of a legislative, an executive, and a judicial branch, with a system of checks and balances among the three branches. Second, it divides power between the federal government and the states.

And third, it protects various individual liberties of American citizens. It hinders the process of social development because of its inability to change easily. It is a source of hindrance during emergencies. An uncodified constitution has the advantages of elasticity, adaptability and resilience. A significant disadvantage, however, is that controversies may arise due to different understandings of the usages and customs which form the fundamental provisions of the constitution.

The great majority of countries have rigid constitutions. The Constitution is made flexible by the elastic clause because it gives government the right to extend its power and meet new situations. However flexibility of the Constitution is the most important because it changes with the times and can handle any situation thrown its way. Table of Contents.

This involves learning to take complete responsibility for our own choices. I am responsible for my own feelings, needs and choices. Control is a strategy. Power is exercised by states — through military and police, through agencies and bureaucracies, through legislation; it is exercised by corporations and other large private organizations; and it is exercised by social movements and other groups within society.

Power is frequently defined by political scientists as the ability to influence the behavior of others with or without resistance. The term authority is often used for power perceived as legitimate by the social structure. The use of power need not involve coercion, force or the threat of force. Why should you use this information? The in- dividuals who occupy key formal authority positions in the major social, economic, political, governmen- tal, cultural, and religious institutions and in related formal voluntary associations are considered the community power actors.

Legitimacy is important for all regimes. Legitimacy sustains political stability as it establishes the reasonableness of a regime, or says, provide reason for the regime to exist. It is because election contributes to provide justification for the existence of a regime, thus consolidates its legitimacy. Moral legitimacy means in accord with the rules of an ethic.

For example, a government may claim legal legitimacy, its laws and rulers being established under its constitution, but it can be accused of not having moral legitimacy if its actions are not in accord with moral criteria. The Congress of Vienna was guided by certain principles, one being the idea of legitimacy. It was a meeting of ambassadors of Europe. It was headed by the Austrian chairman Klemens von Metternich. The main objective of Vienna Congress was to settle the lost peace in Europe.

Alliances devised by Matternich to ensure other nations would help out if other revolutions would break out. Why was the fall of the Bastille important to the French people? National boundaries were redrawn to make it difficult for any nation to become too powerful. The king was considered part of no estate. The French society was divided into three estates. The first estate was of Clergy. The second was of Nobility and the third estate was comprising of commoners such as businessmen, merchants, court officials, lawyers, peasants, artisans, small peasants, landless labours, servants etc.

French society in the eighteen century was divided into three estates, only the members of third estate paid taxes. The members of the first two estate, that is, the clergy and the nobility, enjoyed certain privileges by birth.