Conception Of Political Legitimacy Research Articles

Bernard Williams’ legitimate authority between universalism and relativism

ABSTRACT This paper is divided into two main parts. In the first half, I identify a tension within Bernard Williams’ political realist conception of political legitimacy. On the one hand, he was committed to a peculiar universalist criterion of political legitimacy – what is politically unacceptable is summed up in the old Catholic saying quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est. On the other, he supported the idea that what counts as political legitimacy depends on what we, in the here and now, deem to be politically legitimate – thus suggesting some kind of relativist criterion for political legitimacy. In order to eliminate this tension, I propose a two-step reconstruction of Williams’ works on political philosophy. The second half of the article assesses three criticisms to Willliams’ conception of political legitimacy levied by contemporary political realists. I use my two-step reconstruction of Williams to reject two of these three objections. In addressing the third, I sketch a reading of Williams’ notion of political legitimacy in the context of his ethical project as a whole and, in so doing, overcome the difficulty.

Political legitimacy in Rawls’ early and late political liberalism – Two diverging interpretations

This article assesses Frank I. Michelman’s constitution-centered and proceduralist interpretation of Rawls’ conception of political legitimacy and argues that it merits attention because it highlights the institutional aspects of Rawls’ understanding of political legitimacy for constitutional democracies. However, the article also questions Michelman’s interpretation of Rawls’ ‘liberal principle of legitimacy’ (LPL) and the later ‘idea of political legitimacy based on the criterion of reciprocity’ (ILBR). As Michelman rightly points out, for the exercise of political power to be legitimate in a constitutional democracy, it must be in accordance with a constitution that is itself legitimate or reasonably acceptable to free and equal citizens. Yet, the article argues that Rawls’ two legitimacy formulations are attempts to make an additional point: Namely that when democratic citizens exercise political power in ‘the fundamental political issues’, or in issues that shape the basic justice of society or the essentials of the constitution itself, they must respect the ideal of public reason – or ensure themselves and other citizens that their exercise of political power is in accordance with the underlying basic political-moral ideas of persons and society that make the constitution itself acceptable to them. The LPL and the ILBR are conceptions of political legitimacy, not in the sense of setting up a criterion for when a specific law is legitimate, but in the sense of outlining civic or “office-specific” constraints that citizens and public officials must put on their reasoning and exercise of political power in the fundamental political issues for the practice of a constitutional democracy to be legitimate, or well-ordered, reasonably just, and stable for the right reasons – in the long run. The article also discusses why Rawls saw the need to reformulate the LPL, and how the later ILBR assigns a new significance to citizens’ actual use of public reason and their intersubjective deliberation.

Democracy, Legitimacy, and Mega‐Project Politics: The Evolution of Lahore’s First BRT Corridor

AbstractThis paper studies the politics surrounding the implementation of Pakistan’s first mass transit project, the Lahore Bus Rapid Transit corridor completed in 2013, to interrogate the role that infrastructure mega‐projects hold in highly factional and democratising polities of the global South. Drawing on the Lahore BRT as a case study, this paper posits that infrastructure development is increasingly interwoven with conceptions of political legitimacy and “modernising” governance, especially under conditions of nascent democratic competition. We argue that democratisation‐led transformations in the political‐institutional context of state power has helped fashion new roles for mega‐projects, which partly explains why state power is mobilised for projects that had been ignored for several decades. Finally, this paper cautions that this new role for infrastructure, while marking a departure from previous patterns, can simultaneously constrain the possibilities for sustainable interventions going forward.

Legitimacy between Acceptance and Acceptability

Political realists argue that the concept of political legitimacy should be linked to subjects’ beliefs, while still offering normative guidance. In this article, I suggest doing so by referring to the concepts of acceptance and acceptability. I argue that a regime is legitimate if its power is accepted by subjects, provided that such acceptance meets the requirements of acceptability: subjects’ beliefs about the regime’s legitimacy need to successfully satisfy three requirements—coherence, fact-sensitivity, and politics-sensitivity—via entering public debate. I rely on pragmatism to investigate the link between subjects’ beliefs and their experience of facing political authority.

The European Union’s demoicratic legislature

Abstract In important areas of EU law, the principal law-making institution is the Court of Justice of the European Union and not the EU legislature. This article criticizes the current allocation of power between both institutions and the different conceptions of political legitimacy that have been developed to justify it. The Court’s authority has been justified on the basis of output-oriented conceptions of political legitimacy that ground legitimacy in the kind of outcomes political institutions produce. This article argues that the different standards of output-legitimacy used are important but insufficient to legitimize EU institutions. Only input-oriented legitimacy can serve as a sufficiently strong form of legitimacy for the EU. More concretely, the article argues that the EU must be assessed by demoicratic standards of legitimacy. Unlike output-oriented theories of political legitimacy, which justify the transfer of authority from the EU legislature to the Court, a demoicratic conception of political legitimacy weighs in favor of legislative decision-making. This article explores whether it is possible to improve the political status of the EU legislature without Treaty amendment.

Sexuality education as political theology: pathways to non-violence

ABSTRACT Thinking sexuality education and religion together often results in antagonisms that pit religious and secular values against each other. Political theology provides new insights into this tendency by showing how modern concepts of political legitimacy are based on secularised Christian theology. Neoliberal schooling, public sexual health and human rights provide legitimacy for sexuality education in post-Christian societies and all three are grounded in political theology. The political theology of sexuality education can be seen wherever ideal sexual subjectivities are presented which set up standards which one can succeed or fail to meet with clear consequences. These standards could be heterosexual, safe and marital, but equally agential, pleasurable, transgressive and self-aware. While there may be many ways of escaping the Christian political theological foundations of sexuality education altogether, a political theology of non-violence opens up a way for Christian and secular conceptions of sexuality education to move forward amidst significant cultural and moral difference.

The (Inter-religious?) Rededication of an Arabic Panegyric by Judah al-Ḥarīzī

Abstract This article studies two versions of an Arabic panegyric by the Jewish poet Judah al-Ḥarīzī, one preserved in Hebrew (Judeo-Arabic) script and the other in Arabic script in a biographical dictionary by al-Mubārak ibn Aḥmad al-Mawṣilī (1197-1256). The Judeo-Arabic version was dedicated to a Jewish physician. While the version transmitted by al-Mawṣilī does not have a named addressee, it was likely dedicated to a Muslim. By reading the two versions as iterations of the same basic text accommodated to specific circumstances, this article demonstrates the ways in which the author modulated rhetoric to fit the social positions of the respective addressees. The article studies the dynamics of inter-religious praise and the Jewish internalization of Islamic concepts of political legitimacy.

Justice, Legitimacy and the Authority of Legislation within the European Union

AbstractWhat are we to make of the authority of legislation within the EU? EU lawyers have questioned the significance of legislative decision‐making within the EU. This article challenges these views and argues that the EU legislature must enjoy adequate freedom to shape EU law with the general interest in mind. Institutional accounts that seek to curtail the authority of legislation tend to rest upon ‘content‐dependent’ conceptions of political legitimacy, according to which the legitimacy of a decision depends on its moral qualities. Such conceptions overlook reasonable disagreements on justice and rest upon an overly optimistic (pessimistic) view of the Court (the legislature). The article argues for a content‐independent conception of legitimacy, following which the benefits of legislative decision‐making are more easily understood. The authority of legislation deserves wider recognition among EU lawyers for reasons of political legitimacy and because the EU legislature is better positioned to decide in the general interest.

Two Misunderstandings About Public Justification and Religious Reasons

Two important objections have been raised against exclusivist public reason (EPR). First, it has been argued that EPR entails an unjust burden for citizens who want to appeal to non-public reasons, especially religious reasons. Second, it has been argued that EPR is based on a problematic conception of religious reasons and that it ignores the fact that religious reasons can be public as well. I defend EPR against both objections. I show that the first objection conflates two ideas of public justification (public justification as a conception of political legitimacy and public justification as an ideal of civility) and that the second objection conflates two ways to understand and identify religious reasons. Ultimately, it turns out that those who defend such objections actually share the concerns that justified EPR in the first place. In other words, if we are clear about the idea of public justification and the kind of religious reasons that EPR is really about, it appears that justificatory liberals are in fact all exclusivists.

Legitimacy without Liberalism: A Defense of Max Weber’s Standard of Political Legitimacy

Abstract In this paper I defend Max Weber's concept of political legitimacy as a standard for the moral evaluation of states. On this view, a state is legitimate when its subjects regard it as having a valid claim to exercise power and authority. Weber’s analysis of legitimacy is often assumed to be merely descriptive, but I argue that Weberian legitimacy has moral significance because it indicates that political stability has been secured on the basis of civic alignment. Stability on this basis enables all the goods of peaceful cooperation with minimal state violence and intimidation, thereby guarding against alienation and tyranny. Furthermore, I argue, since Weberian legitimacy is empirically measurable in terms that avoid controversial value judgments, its adoption would bridge a longstanding divide between philosophers and social scientists

The Early Zhou Period: Origin of the Idea of Political Legitimacy and the Political Philosophy of Confucianism

The Chunqiu and Zhanguo Periods are usually regarded as the birth of Chinese philosophy, especially with regard to practical or moral philosophy. If we think about the concept of political legitimacy in the Early Zhou Period, with ideas like the “Mandate of Heaven”, “respect virtue” and “protect ruled people”, then this Period is not only the origin of this in ancient China, but also of Chinese philosophy, and primarily the political philosophy of Confucianism. The paper will first explain some documents in the “inscriptions on ancient bronze objects” in order to prove that the ideas of the “Mandate of Heaven”, “respect virtue” and “protect ruled people” really originated from this time. Through analysis of several Zhou documents from the Book of the Documents the paper will then demonstrate that these ideas are the three most important innovations in the history of Chinese thinking at that time.

Pluralising political legitimacy

ABSTRACTDoes the Australian state exercise legitimate power over the indigenous peoples within its borders? To say that the state’s political decisions are legitimate is to say that it has the right to impose those decisions on indigenous peoples and that they have a (at least a prima facie) duty to obey. In this paper, I consider the general normative frameworks within which these questions are often grasped in contemporary political theory. Two dominant modes of dealing with political legitimacy are through the politics of ‘recognition’ and ‘justification’. I argue that in order to address the fundamental challenges posed by indigenous peoples to liberal settler states today we need to pluralise our conceptions of political legitimacy.

Political legitimacy in Japan: a Luhmannian perspective

Despite widespread public opinion against many of his policies, Abe Shinzo’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is not only maintaining its electoral success but expanding on it. Furthermore the LDP has been in almost continual power since 1955, making Japan in the eyes of some a de facto one-party state. This paper will explore the question of legitimacy in Japan’s political system, especially the ones raised by Karel van Wolferen the 1980s, and whether the current power structure can be considered to hold it. Through using Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, in particular his concept of political legitimacy, it will be shown that while electoral reforms in 1994 addressed most of the systemic legitimacy issues in Japan’s political system, a potential deficit in the government/opposition coding remains.

Towards a More Nuanced Theory of Elite Capture in Development Projects. The Importance of Context and Theories of Power

Elite capture in development projects is problematic across a wide range of cultures, governance contexts and geographical locations. The dominant development discourse suggests that elite capture can be addressed using principles of good governance and participatory democracy. We critique the notion that this is sufficient to challenge practices of elite domination that detrimentally affect the outcome of development projects. Using a Foucauldian notion of power we suggest that power relationships are more complex than current conceptualisations of elite capture allow. We offer some definitions and suggest a common conceptual framework to unify the concept of elite capture across cultures. This conceptual framework is used to analyse data from 2 case studies in south western Zambia. We conclude that the dominant discourse ignores complex power relationships and uses a simplistic notion of political legitimacy that may enhance elite capture rather than prevent it. The concept of political legitimacy needs to be expanded to include traditional institutions that are not elected, while still applying principles of participation and accountability to the design of institutions.

Debating legitimacy transnationally

As modes and institutions of governance proliferate beyond the state, legitimacy has become a key concept for assessing, supporting or contesting not only the domestic but also the international political order. Often, however, it tends to be used as an umbrella term encompassing different standards of evaluation. How we are to understand legitimacy beyond the state systemically and to relate the different discussions on legitimacy to each other or to the legitimacy of our political order in its entirety are questions yet to be answered. Against this background, I aim to systematise the underlying issues and questions discussed in contemporary politics and in academic debates by means of a relational conception of political legitimacy. This conception stresses the importance of a constructive relation between institutions and those subject to them, i.e. between objects and subjects of legitimacy. They form the frame of the norms and processes, implied in conceptions of legitimacy. By foregrounding this relation, it becomes visible that debates on norms and processes, which transcend the state, implicate uncertainties, if not struggles about the subjects and objects of legitimacy. Thus, making explicit and discussing openly who the subjects of legitimacy are and how they are or should be related to the objects of legitimacy constitutes a jurisdictional challenge. This is a challenge we have to face if we accept and apply legitimacy as a valid standard for transnational politics. In addition, determining the subject of legitimacy constitutes a conceptual and political challenge, which becomes especially relevant when debating legitimacy transnationally. While both challenges call for broadening and deepening our understanding of legitimate political orders as well as legitimate second-order decisions, the latter, in particular, constitutes a meta-jurisdictional task when thinking about and debating the legitimacy of political orders.

Government, rights and legitimacy: Foucault and liberal political normativity

One way to characterise the difference between analytic and Continental political philosophy concerns the different roles played by normative and descriptive analysis in each case. This article argues that, even though Michel Foucault’s genealogy of liberal and neoliberal governmentality and John Rawls’s political liberalism involve different articulations of normative and descriptive concerns, they are complementary rather than antithetical to one another. The argument is developed in three stages: first, by suggesting that Foucault offers a way to conceive of public reason as a historical phenomenon. Second, it is suggested that both Rawls and Foucault allow us to consider rights as historical and particular rather than a-historical and universal. Third, it is argued that Foucault’s genealogy of modern liberal government illuminates some of the tensions and some of the alternatives within the liberal tradition in relation to the concept of political legitimacy.

Comments on Coherence Theory in the Philosophy of Law

Coherentism, in philosophy generally, is of either an epistemological or a metaphysical type. The epistemological type responds to worries about foundationalism that have no serious counterpart within the philosophy of law. The metaphysical type is implausible generally, but has been put to use within the philosophy of law - by Ronald Dworkin in particular - to close up gaps in the law that provide an opening for purportedly worrisome exercises of judicial discretion. These remarks conclude with the suggestion that the conception of political legitimacy that underlies such worries is crude and unwarranted.

An international study on public confidence in police

Levels of public confidence in police vary greatly internationally, yet little is known about the causes of this variation. I investigate public confidence in police and identify country-level factors that contribute to its variation cross-nationally. From Rawls’ conception of political legitimacy, I hypothesize that stable and high-level democracy increase confidence in the police, while government corruption lowers this confidence. I further hypothesize that these effects are particularly exaggerated among ethnic minority groups. Collectively, results suggest that reduction of government corruption is the most important thing any nation can do to garner public confidence in police.

The Continuation of Coercion and Human Rights Violations in Indonesia’s Papua: Causes and Solutions

Almost all year in 2012, coercion and human rights violations were the main features of Papuans’ daily life; these were marked primarily by the continuation of ethnic war (quite dominant before 2001), coercion, and gunfire between the security apparatus and Papuans. The focus of a solution towards this problem should pay particular attention to understanding the Papuan case comprehensively in Papua comprehensively. The roots of the problem and its challenges cover several factors: demographic issues, the history of coercion and human rights violations for more than 50 years, and the issue of welfare. All of these factors should be addressed with realistic and comprehensive solutions based on understanding the mistakes of the past. Achieving successful development can only happen with a stable political and economic condition where peace serves as the foundation. Integration of Papuan aspirations and popular involvement of locals is necessary. In contrast, the Indonesian central government’s continuing policy of coercion and human rights violations in Indonesia’s Papua will only result in a cycle of violence. Muthiah Alagappa’s (1995 and 2001) concept of political legitimacy as based on people’s desires and the national and local consensus is a constructive basis for improving the situation in Papua.

Legitimacy as a Mere Moral Power? A Response to Applbaum

In a recent article, Arthur Applbaum contributes a new view—legitimacy as a moral power—to the debate over the concept of political legitimacy. Applbaum rejects competing views of legitimacy, in particular legitimacy as a claim-right to have the law obeyed, for mistakenly invoking substantive moral argument in the conceptual analysis, and concludes that “at the core of the concept—what legitimacy is” is only a Hohfeldian moral power. In this article, I contend that: (1) Applbaum’s view of legitimacy, when fully unfolded, refers to more than a mere moral power and should therefore be rejected even by his own standards; (2) Applbaum’s rejection of competing views of legitimacy ultimately relies on a claim that he does not successfully defend, namely, the claim that moral duties are of absolute rather than prima facie force.