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More Reports Read all our reports that explore we can shape a new future for government. Blog Read how leaders are transforming lives and achieving public impact. Partnering for impact Projects and research conducted with other government changemakers in our global network. About Us What we do What we do, how we work, who and where we are. Go back. April 23rd, Legitimacy. Article highlights Citizen engagement requires acknowledging citizens as individuals, says tommilaitio FindingLegitimacy Share article.
Government should be a partnership between those in power and the people, says thatginamiller FindingLegitimacy Share article. Citizens juries should become a core component of our constitution in a deliberative, detoxified democracy, says ngruen1 FindingLegitimacy Share article.
To solve problems and understand the role and limitations of government, too, will require a new way of thinking and working and a new level of trust and understanding of people We have been privileged to speak to people from around the world, young and old, from both inside and outside of government, during the course of our research.
Citizen engagement starts with understanding people's needs Tommi Laitio, executive director, culture and leisure, City of Helsinki "Engagement means more than thinking in averages; it requires acknowledging citizens as individuals with different interests, skills, needs and ambitions. Governments should care - but it's a two way street with the public Gina Miller, activist, campaigner and business leader "This is absolutely their job.
Politicians need to start by being honest Ira Campbell, managing director of a youth centre in Brixton, London "Young people hear a lot of politicians talking and talking but then nothing ever seems to happen. Involve the citizen's voice in decision-making Claudia Chwalisz, policy analyst, OECD "Beyond the obvious democratic benefit, involving citizens in big policy decisions and giving them the time to become informed before they give their recommendations leads to more legitimate and effective policies.
Competence, fairness, and caring are all critical to legitimacy Amanda Greene, lecturer in political philosophy, University College London "There must be positive perceptions of government along three distinct dimensions.
Re-enfranchise the public Constanza Gomez Mont, co-founder, and director, and Claudia Del Pozo project co-ordinator, PIDES "Citizens want to participate, but in the current environment they feel that it is 'a search without knowing what to look for'.
Introduce citizens' juries Nicholas Gruen, CEO of Lateral Economics, chairman of the Open Knowledge Foundation Australia "These should ultimately become a core component of our constitution in a deliberative, detoxified democracy.
Government has to learn from citizens Magdalena Kuemkel, programme manager, Centre for Public Impact "Our research shows that the relationship between governments and citizens is at breaking point. Ensure a focus on both processes and outcomes Aparajita Bharti, co-founder, Young Leaders for Active Citizenship, India "Trust is not just built by the actions of political leaders at the highest levels of government but also by frontline service providers by giving clarity of direction to people in their day-to-day lives.
In Canada, reconciliation and legitimacy will only happen with a 'total restart' Rhonda Moore, policy lead, Public Policy Forum "True reconciliation for Indigenous people will not happen within the parameters of a Westminster system where the Crown continues to hold all the power and First Nations people have none. Embrace empathy Leonardo Quattruci, policy assistant to the director-general, European Political Strategy Centre "Governments need to develop empathy.
Three priorities in Lebanon: transparency, citizen-centricity, and digitalisation Sarah-Jane Noujeim, junior associate, The Boston Consulting Group "Policymakers have a lot to prove in order to re-establish trust and bridge the gap between themselves and the Lebanese people. You may also be interested in By Beatriz Cano Buchholz. By Devon Genua. By Elena Bolbolian. By Polly Mackenzie. By Lila Wolff. 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.
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?
It is dependent on particular contexts, circumstances and communities. Legitimacy has multiple formal and informal sources. But there is general agreement that it will be greater where there are high levels of political inclusion, participation, representation and achievement. Many of the conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries have been about the legitimacy of state institutions or particular political regimes.
Donors have focused on building effective, legitimate and resilient state institutions. The enhancement of state legitimacy has become a central dimension of multilateral development assistance and a prerequisite for stable peace. But what are legitimate state and society institutions? Max Weber in the early 20th century distinguished three types of legitimate authority, based on:. Critics question its Western bias and whether there are alternative ways of guaranteeing political participation and inclusion.
The fact is that all legitimacy has a very distinctive genealogy. It is intimately linked to specific cultures, modes of production, particular types of decision-making and law-making processes and wider theories of continuity and change. There is now considerable evidence to suggest that post-colonial states that have emerged from pre-colonial states and have maintained strong and resilient social relationships based on custom and tradition have a much better prospect of being effective and legitimate than those which have not.
States without a pre-colonial history of statehood are much more prone to fragility, because their legitimacy rests on actors and institutions that have their roots in the stateless pre-colonial past rather than with the institutions of newly independent states.
Instead of assuming that traditional and charismatic authority will disappear in modernity, it makes sense to embrace progressive and functional forms of authority in order to capitalise on the social and political benefits of persistent customs and traditions. Most customary sources of legitimacy are based on norms of trust and reciprocity. The core constitutive values that lie at the heart of traditional legitimacy enable families, kin groups, tribes and communities to exist, satisfy basic human needs and survive through time.
These have in many instances been disrupted by rational-legal forms of governance and the contentious liberal peace assumption that modern statebuilding is peacebuilding.
If traditional processes can deliver effective education, welfare, health and food security they should be encouraged since this will enhance overall performance legitimacy and add momentum to deeper process legitimacy — that is, the development of an acceptable rule of law and appropriate accountability mechanisms for politicians and public servants.
Stakeholders in a peace process can enhance legitimacy by taking the time to identify customary values, beliefs and practices that play strong integrative, productive, community building and peacebuilding roles.
In these contexts it is often the community that provides the nexus of order, security and basic public goods. People have confidence in their community and its leaders, but low levels of trust in the government and state performance.
The state is perceived as an alien external force, far away not only physically in the capital city , but also psychologically. Individuals are loyal to their group whatever that may be , not the state. Members of traditional communities are tied into a network of social relations and mutual obligations, and these obligations are understood as being far more meaningful and powerful than those of a citizen. People do not obey the rules of the state, but the rules of their group.
Legitimacy rests with the leaders of that group, not with the state authorities. External donors and actors need to work with the grain of local endogenous cultures, traditions and sources of legitimacy rather than against them. Legitimacy is grounded when the system of governance and authority flows from and is connected to local realities.
A range of different forms or sources of legitimacy may be considered grounded. Thus traditional leadership and rational-legal legitimacy may both be forms of grounded legitimacy, depending on their context. Legitimacy that depends almost solely on instrumental performance such as around service delivery or economic growth is not grounded legitimacy.
For example, an international transitional administration in a post-conflict state may meet a range of performance targets. But because it is disconnected from local peace and development processes legitimacy will not be grounded.
Similarly, some national governments may be fulfilling a range of state functions without having grounded legitimacy.
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