Though historically important, the notion of tacit consent plays little role in contemporary discussions of political legitimacy. The idea, in fact, is often dismissed as obviously implausible. The ambition of this paper is to challenge this assumption and show that tacit consent can become a key ingredient in a theory of legitimacy. Instead of defining tacit consent through residence (where, according to John Locke or Plato's Socrates, staying in the country amounts to tacitly consenting to its system of rule), the (...) paper explores a different strategy, delimiting tacit consent as an absence of active dissent. The basic idea starts from the fact that widespread anti-government protests and demonstrations always carry a potent delegitimating force. Political legitimacy is therefore never permanent and unchangeable, regardless of the nature of the regime, and can be undermined at all times by active dissent from the population. Having established the relationship between dissent and delegitimation of political power, even the inverted, stronger claim is defended: the absence of active dissent (i.e., tacit consent) can, under certain circumstances, serve to legitimize political power. The paper sets up and defends several conditions that need to be met for the right normative mandate to be created by the population tacitly accepting the existing power arrangements. If those are fulfilled (especially when full freedom of expression and information is granted), tacit consent can become a vital element of political legitimacy. (shrink)

In representative democracies, the absence of responsiveness by elected officials to the interests of the represented often generates problems of legitimacy, accountability and effectiveness. However, responsiveness also tends to narrow the time horizons of democratic decision-making and promote short-termism. This paper advances the notion that responsiveness to interests involving distant time horizons is possible by reconfiguring the franchise in a time-sensitive and future-oriented way. It is divided into two parts. The first pinpoints a few inconsistencies in the available proposals for (...) making responsiveness and the long term compatible (e.g., promoting youth turnout, narrowing the franchise to robust epistemic fitness, establishing future-oriented institutions). The second advances the creation of temporal electoral circles operating alongside territorial electoral circles in order to prompt responsiveness to multitemporal interests. The conclusion asserts that this kind of franchise design is the best available option for introducing temporal aspects into the character of democratic representation. (shrink)

There are two bodies of literature, one offering theories of the legitimacy of domestic institutions like states, another offering theories of the legitimacy of international institutions like the IMF. Accounts of domestic legitimacy stress the importance of democratic procedure, while few to no theorists make democracy a necessary condition for the legitimacy of international institutions. In this paper, I ask whether this asymmetry can be defended. Is there a unified higher-order theory which can explain why legitimacy requires democracy in the (...) domestic context, but not in the international context? I argue that no proceduralist higher-order theory succeeds, and that we need to look for other solutions. (shrink)

In this critical comment, we argue that nondemocratic, but decent regimes fail to constitute legitimate governance under Applbaum’s free group agency account. To make this case, we first introduce the three principles of liberty, equality and agency that Applbaum takes to flow directly from his free agency conception of legitimacy. Against this backdrop, we discuss Applbaum’s claim that a nondemocratic regime along the lines of a Rawlsian decent consultation hierarchy could meet the threshold of legitimacy. Contrary to this suggestion, we (...) argue that nondemocratic, but decent regimes cannot claim legitimacy under Applbaum’s account because they are constitutively inegalitarian, thus failing to adequately grant citizens the equal normative power without which legitimacy is unattainable under the free group agency account. (shrink)

In Legitimacy: The Right to Rule in a Wanton World, I offer both a conceptual analysis of legitimacy, the power-liability view, and a substantive moral theory, the free group agency view. Here, I defend my account against three challenges brought by Kjarsten Mikalsen. First, though I argue that conceptual analysis should not prematurely close open moral questions, it is not my view that conceptual analysis must have no substantive implications. Second, though I acknowledge that free group agency ordinarily supports a (...) moral duty to obey, it is a feature, not a bug, that my conceptual analysis is consistent with moral theories that disagree with my preferred moral theory. Third, I argue that Mikalsen’s proposed explanation of justified civil disobedience, which sees law in such cases as creating a moral claim-right that entails a merely presumptive duty, is less perspicuous than the explanation given by the power-liability view. Along the way, I emphasize that the distinction between felicitous moral power and justified causal power is as important as the distinction between moral liability and moral duty. (shrink)

I argue that legitimacy discourses serve a gatekeeping function. They give practitioners telic standards for riding herd on social practices, ensuring that minimally acceptable versions of the practice are implemented. Such a function is a necessary part of implementing formalized social practices, especially including law. This gatekeeping account shows that political philosophers have misunderstood legitimacy; it is not secondary to justice and only necessary because we cannot agree about justice. Instead, it is a necessary feature of actual human social practices, (...) which must be implemented via practitioners' discretion in changing contexts. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that any competent group agent must be a wanton. The impetus for this claim is an argument Arthur Applbaum makes in Legitimacy: The Right to Rule in a Wanton World that a formal institution (in this case, a government) can, under the right conditions, function as a free moral group agent. I begin by explaining Harry Frankfurt’s classic account of wantonism—not just for the benefit of readers who might not be familiar with the concept, but (...) also to emphasize aspects of the concept relevant for the consideration of group agency. I then draw on the contemporary literature on group agency to argue that any successful group agent will be a wanton. I then turn to Applbaum’s account of group agency to argue that his proposed mechanisms for free moral group agency do not successfully overcome the challenge of wantonism. I close the essay by briefly addressing some of the ramifications of my argument for Applbaum’s larger project in Legitimacy. I argue that, after rejecting the flawed account of free moral group agency, we can productively recover some of Applbaum’s key insights within a revised account of political legitimacy. (shrink)

International institutions are facing increasing criticism of the legitimacy of their authority. But what does it mean for an international institution to be legitimate? Arthur Applbaum’s latest book provides a convincing new concept of legitimacy, namely, the power-liability view, and a new normative conception, the free group agent account. However, it is not clear how they can be applied to the international level. First, this paper examines how different concepts of legitimacy can be applied to international institutions. Second, it assesses (...) three different conceptions of legitimacy, namely, the service conception, Applbaum’s free group agent account and the autonomy-based conception for the international level. It outlines how on the last conception, international institutions’ legitimacy depends on three different aspects required to protect autonomy: the political power of the institution; its purpose; and its relation to other institutions. Finally, the paper argues that the creation of an international institution should be seen as part of relational legitimacy and that state consent plays an important role to protect the political autonomy of peoples. (shrink)

In this paper, I take issue with Arthur Isak Applbaum’s power-liability view of political legitimacy. In contrast to the traditional view that legitimate rule entails a moral duty to obey, here called the right-duty view, Applbaum argues that political legitimacy is a moral power that entails moral liability for the subjects of political rule. According to Applbaum, the power-liability view helps us explain how responsible citizens in some cases can act contrary to law while still recognizing the claims of law. (...) Against Applbaum’s attempt at establishing the power-liability view through conceptual analysis, I argue that we cannot specify the moral implications of de jure legitimacy without considering the moral argument that justifies the right to rule. I further argue that Applbaum’s normative account of political legitimacy implies commitment to a normative idea that forms the basis of a strong case in favor of the right-duty view. Finally, I argue that the present defense of the right-duty view has resources to account for the moral phenomena that prompt Applbaum’s advocacy of the power-liability view. (shrink)

The legislature and the judiciary have been a constant focus of contemporary political philosophy. However, the executive – ‘the government’ itself – has been comparatively neglected. Today, this is changing with a well-spring of new work that bears upon what we might call the ideal of ‘good governance’, that is, how governments (and/or their agents) should exercise their powers. This review paper begins by clarifying the concepts of ‘governance’ and ‘good’ governance (§1). It then highlights five sets of values, working (...) nominally from the most foundational constraints on the exercise of government power to those that should guide the exercise of discretion: legitimacy and rule of law (§2); respect and trustworthiness (§3); efficiency and rationality (§4); public participation and accountability (§5); and the public interest and fiduciary duties (§6). (shrink)

This essay contributes to developing a new approach to political legitimacy by asking what is involved in judging the legitimacy of a regime from a practical point of view. It is focused on one aspect of this question: the role of identity in such judgment. I examine three ways of understanding the significance of identity for political legitimacy: the foundational, associative, and agonistic picture. Neither view, I claim, persuasively captures the dilemmas of judgment in the face of disagreement and uncertainty (...) about who “I” am and who “we” are. I then propose a composite, pragmatic picture. This view casts the question of political legitimacy as an existential predicament: it is fundamentally a question about who you are—both as a person and as a member of collectives. The pragmatic picture integrates rational, prudential, and ethical qualities of good judgment that were heretofore associated with mutually exclusive ways of theorizing legitimacy. It also implies that the question of legitimacy cannot be resolved philosophically. (shrink)

According to the Public Justification Principle, legitimate laws must be justifiable to all reasonable citizens. Proponents of this principle assume that its satisfaction requires speakers to offer justifications that are representable as arguments that feature premises which reasonable listeners would accept. I develop the concept of dark knowledge to show that this assumption is false. Laws are often justified on the basis of premises that many reasonable listeners know, even though they would reject these premises on the basis of the (...) further considerations that speakers implicitly rely on for their support. Accommodating the fact of dark knowledge requires us to consider the civic virtue of speakers to be more important for public justification than the acceptability of their arguments to reasonable citizens. I sketch an alternative conception of public justification that incorporates these results and argue that it provides a rationale for ignoring the otherwise sound contributions of some participants in political deliberation. (shrink)

Political legitimacy is a virtue of political institutions and of the decisions—about laws, policies, and candidates for political office—made within them. This entry will survey the main answers that have been given to the following questions. First, how should legitimacy be defined? Is it primarily a descriptive or a normative concept? If legitimacy is understood normatively, what does it entail? Some associate legitimacy with the justification of coercive power and with the creation of political authority. Others associate it with the (...) justification, or at least the sanctioning, of existing political authority. Authority stands for a right to rule—a right to issue commands and, possibly, to enforce these commands using coercive power. An additional question is whether legitimate political authority is understood to entail political obligations or not. Most people probably think it does. But some think that the moral obligation to obey political authority can be separated from an account of legitimate authority, or at least that such obligations arise only if further conditions hold. (shrink)