power authority and legitimacy essay

Legitimacy, Authority, and Power Essay

An authority that is considered to be legitimate has the liberty to exercise power. Legitimacy is the ability to be defended with valid logic and justification. Authority is the power to influence opinion, behavior, and thought. Power is the capacity to influence the behavior of others. Legitimacy involves acceptance of an enforced law as an authority, whereas power involves persuading others to do something. Power becomes an authority after getting legitimized; thus, it is more effective. This paper argues that power, authority, and legitimacy are essential factors in politics because they provide political stability. Various methods have been put into practice to make the argument, such as determining the relationship between the elements and distinguishing them from each other. This essay will address power, authority, and legitimacy and look at the relationship and differences between the aspects in regard to political stability.

Power is used in politics to implement decisions making it more efficient when it is not a source of coercion. The stability of authority depends on how power is used. Authority is the capacity of an institution, people, and order; thus, it is essential in ensuring authenticity so that people follow regulations without hesitating (Koivunen and Vuorelma, 2022). Authority substitutes two main factors; Legitimacy and Power.

The legitimacy of a rule implies that people are ready to follow regulations because they reckon decisions made as fruitful in the community (Siess and Amossy, 2022). Exercising power is not necessary when legitimacy is attached to power but rather only comes out as a symbol. Power ensures the implementation of decisions and rules through the coercion of authority but later works as a catalyst for rebellion. Power is enabled by legitimacy; many communities follow the rules based on legitimacy; thus, enforcing power is unnecessary (Gardner-McTaggart, 2022, p.1-16). If the legitimacy of a law is rendered unchaste, a rule or regulation will not be observed, irrespective of the power of authority.

Legitimacy transforms power into authority and ensures political stability. Legitimacy is a psychologically accepted practice to exercise power. A person can have legitimacy and lack power contrary; a person can also have power but lack legitimacy. Authority has a legitimate right to rule, command, and write rules and laws. Legitimacy makes a relation between authority and power and helps the community to understand that political forces and regulations within the society are justified and rightful (Amossy, 2022, p.28). The relationship between power, authority, and legitimacy creates political stability used by most developed countries. Authority is associated with consent, while political power is based on authority. Force or power exercised without authority is ineffective in the political realm because authority can only be legitimate with consent. Power becomes more effective when it is not a source of coercion; thus, power becomes authority after getting legitimized.

Power is the ability to get someone to do something without giving them a choice, while authority is the right to give commands. Authority is perceived as legitimate power granted to a person or group over others in an organization (Andreopoulos and Rosow, 2022, pp.93-95). Power is an acquired ability, while authority is a legal right that high officials concede. Research conducted by Max Weber showed that power could not be possessed; rather, one can have means of power such as resources, determination, and luck (McLean and Nix, 2022, pp.1287-1309). The major sources of power are knowledge and expertise, while the position in an office determines authority. Power enforces the individual or collective will of groups of people, while legitimacy is a socially constructed right to use power. Legitimate power comes from an individual’s organizational role.

In political science, legitimacy involves the acceptance of authority from a governing law, whereas authority denotes a specific position in a government establishment. Studies showed the distinction between authority and legitimacy in resource-exchange analysis redirected from a preoccupation with differences in charismatic and patrimonial and source and degree (Akinlabi, 2022, p.11-24). Legitimacy is a formal authority from a job title that adds a sense of order and structure to the working environment. In contrast, authority involves assigning responsibilities, making decisions, and enforcing compliance (Alter, 2022). Power, authority, and legitimacy are exercised separately and constitute different practices.

Learning about the importance of power in political stability brings changes and educates people about government possession of control and authority. A country’s stability is ensured by implementing laws that benefit the socioeconomic sector. Power is essential in human life; it acquires many structures, is evident in many customs, and appears in many places (Brannigan, 2022, pp.417-427). Political leaders can exploit power through acts of injustice, such as corruption and bribery. Knowing strategies to take when powers are exploited helps create awareness. In the presence of power, rules can be made, mended, and broken to make changes.

Laws can be broken if they minimize opportunities, create unfair practices, exploit marginalized communities, and cause damage. Restoring and creating new rules while considering people’s opinions will help establish laws that apply to everyone. The changes made through amending new rules ensure that the needs of a community are addressed. Power is an effective tool that can succeed if used correctly and for the right reasons. The argument on power in political stability is relevant in reducing individual exploitation through control and changing society.

Legitimacy and authority in politics build political stability when they are associated together. Developed countries have established political institutions to provide the basis of strength. Countries that exercise just authority and legitimacy are more likely to succeed. Before 2003, Iraq was based on political legitimacy, but after the U.S. government used military force to bring down democracy, the political system of Iraq collapsed (Sabikh, 2022, pp.72-79). Iraq has been suffering from political instability since the establishment of the modern states in 1920, and the issue further increased in 2003 (Sabikh, 2022, pp.72-79). The argument of political stability resulting from legitimacy and authority is essential in ensuring the development of a country and reinforcing government strategies.

Power, authority, and legitimacy are important aspects that contribute to political stability. Power is the ability to carry out a task, authority is a social power within organized groups, and legitimacy identifies whether authority is justified. Power is enabled by legitimacy, while legitimacy transforms power into authority. On the other hand, authority is associated with consent, while political power is based on authority. Political stability is related to the relationship between the three factors. Power, authority, and legitimacy are distinguished by definition and application. Legitimacy involves the acceptance of authority from a governing law, whereas authority denotes a specific position in a government organization. Power contributes to changes through the amendment of new regulations. Authority and legitimacy are vital in the development and growth of a country. These aspects are also essential in politics due to political stability.

Reference List

Akinlabi, O.M., 2022. Understanding Legitimacy in Weber’s Perspectives and Contemporary Society . In Police-Citizen Relations in Nigeria (pp. 11-24). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. Web.

Alter, K.J., 2022. The Contested Authority and Legitimacy of International Law: The State Strikes Back . Web.

Amossy, R. (2022). Constructing political legitimacy and authority in discourse. Argumentation and Discourse Analysis , (28). Web.

Andreopoulos, G. and Rosow, S.J., 2022. Governance, authority, and legitimacy in the global space. In Reconfigurations of Authority, Power and Territoriality (pp. 93-95). Edward Elgar Publishing. Web.

Brannigan, J., 2022. Introduction: history, power, and politics in the literary artefact. In Literary Theories (pp. 417-427). Edinburgh University Press. Web.

Gardner-McTaggart, A., 2022. Legitimacy, power, and Aesthetics in the International Baccalaureate. Globalization, Societies, and Education , pp.1-16. Web.

Koivunen, A. and Vuorelma, J., 2022. Trust and authority in the age of mediatized politics . European Journal of Communication , 37(4). Web.

McLean, K. and Nix, J., 2022. Understanding the bounds of legitimacy: Weber’s facets of legitimacy and the police empowerment hypothesis . Justice Quarterly , 39 (6), pp.1287-1309. Web.

Sabikh, D.Y., 2022. The internal causes of Iraqi political instability after 2003. World Politics , (1), pp.72-79. Web.

Siess, J. and Amossy, R., 2022. Democratic legitimacy and authority in times of Corona: Angela Merkel’s address to the nation. Argumentation and Discourse Analysis , (28). Web.

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14.1 Power and Authority

Learning objectives.

• Define power and the three types of authority.
• List Weber’s three types of authority.
• Explain why charismatic authority may be unstable in the long run.

Politics refers to the distribution and exercise of power within a society, and polity refers to the political institution through which power is distributed and exercised. In any society, decisions must be made regarding the allocation of resources and other matters. Except perhaps in the simplest societies, specific people and often specific organizations make these decisions. Depending on the society, they sometimes make these decisions solely to benefit themselves and other times make these decisions to benefit the society as a whole. Regardless of who benefits, a central point is this: some individuals and groups have more power than others. Because power is so essential to an understanding of politics, we begin our discussion of politics with a discussion of power.

Power refers to the ability to have one’s will carried out despite the resistance of others. Most of us have seen a striking example of raw power when we are driving a car and see a police car in our rearview mirror. At that particular moment, the driver of that car has enormous power over us. We make sure we strictly obey the speed limit and all other driving rules. If, alas, the police car’s lights are flashing, we stop the car, as otherwise we may be in for even bigger trouble. When the officer approaches our car, we ordinarily try to be as polite as possible and pray we do not get a ticket. When you were 16 and your parents told you to be home by midnight or else, your arrival home by this curfew again illustrated the use of power, in this case parental power. If a child in middle school gives her lunch to a bully who threatens her, that again is an example of the use of power, or, in this case, the misuse of power.

These are all vivid examples of power, but the power that social scientists study is both grander and, often, more invisible (Wrong, 1996). Much of it occurs behind the scenes, and scholars continue to debate who is wielding it and for whose benefit they wield it. Many years ago Max Weber (1921/1978), one of the founders of sociology discussed in earlier chapters, distinguished legitimate authority as a special type of power. Legitimate authority (sometimes just called authority ), Weber said, is power whose use is considered just and appropriate by those over whom the power is exercised. In short, if a society approves of the exercise of power in a particular way, then that power is also legitimate authority. The example of the police car in our rearview mirrors is an example of legitimate authority.

Weber’s keen insight lay in distinguishing different types of legitimate authority that characterize different types of societies, especially as they evolve from simple to more complex societies. He called these three types traditional authority, rational-legal authority, and charismatic authority. We turn to these now.

Traditional Authority

As the name implies, traditional authority is power that is rooted in traditional, or long-standing, beliefs and practices of a society. It exists and is assigned to particular individuals because of that society’s customs and traditions. Individuals enjoy traditional authority for at least one of two reasons. The first is inheritance, as certain individuals are granted traditional authority because they are the children or other relatives of people who already exercise traditional authority. The second reason individuals enjoy traditional authority is more religious: their societies believe they are anointed by God or the gods, depending on the society’s religious beliefs, to lead their society. Traditional authority is common in many preindustrial societies, where tradition and custom are so important, but also in more modern monarchies (discussed shortly), where a king, queen, or prince enjoys power because she or he comes from a royal family.

Traditional authority is granted to individuals regardless of their qualifications. They do not have to possess any special skills to receive and wield their authority, as their claim to it is based solely on their bloodline or supposed divine designation. An individual granted traditional authority can be intelligent or stupid, fair or arbitrary, and exciting or boring but receives the authority just the same because of custom and tradition. As not all individuals granted traditional authority are particularly well qualified to use it, societies governed by traditional authority sometimes find that individuals bestowed it are not always up to the job.

Rational-Legal Authority

If traditional authority derives from custom and tradition, rational-legal authority derives from law and is based on a belief in the legitimacy of a society’s laws and rules and in the right of leaders to act under these rules to make decisions and set policy. This form of authority is a hallmark of modern democracies, where power is given to people elected by voters, and the rules for wielding that power are usually set forth in a constitution, a charter, or another written document. Whereas traditional authority resides in an individual because of inheritance or divine designation, rational-legal authority resides in the office that an individual fills, not in the individual per se. The authority of the president of the United States thus resides in the office of the presidency, not in the individual who happens to be president. When that individual leaves office, authority transfers to the next president. This transfer is usually smooth and stable, and one of the marvels of democracy is that officeholders are replaced in elections without revolutions having to be necessary. We might not have voted for the person who wins the presidency, but we accept that person’s authority as our president when he (so far it has always been a “he”) assumes office.

Rational-legal authority helps ensure an orderly transfer of power in a time of crisis. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Vice President Lyndon Johnson was immediately sworn in as the next president. When Richard Nixon resigned his office in disgrace in 1974 because of his involvement in the Watergate scandal, Vice President Gerald Ford (who himself had become vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned because of financial corruption) became president. Because the U.S. Constitution provided for the transfer of power when the presidency was vacant, and because U.S. leaders and members of the public accept the authority of the Constitution on these and so many other matters, the transfer of power in 1963 and 1974 was smooth and orderly.

Charismatic Authority

Charismatic authority stems from an individual’s extraordinary personal qualities and from that individual’s hold over followers because of these qualities. Such charismatic individuals may exercise authority over a whole society or only a specific group within a larger society. They can exercise authority for good and for bad, as this brief list of charismatic leaders indicates: Joan of Arc, Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus Christ, Muhammad, and Buddha. Each of these individuals had extraordinary personal qualities that led their followers to admire them and to follow their orders or requests for action.

Much of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s appeal as a civil rights leader stemmed from his extraordinary speaking skills and other personal qualities that accounted for his charismatic authority.

U.S. Library of Congress – public domain.

Charismatic authority can reside in a person who came to a position of leadership because of traditional or rational-legal authority. Over the centuries, several kings and queens of England and other European nations were charismatic individuals as well (while some were far from charismatic). A few U.S. presidents—Washington, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Kennedy, Reagan, and, for all his faults, even Clinton—also were charismatic, and much of their popularity stemmed from various personal qualities that attracted the public and sometimes even the press. Ronald Reagan, for example, was often called “the Teflon president,” because he was so loved by much of the public that accusations of ineptitude or malfeasance did not stick to him (Lanoue, 1988).

Weber emphasized that charismatic authority in its pure form (i.e., when authority resides in someone solely because of the person’s charisma and not because the person also has traditional or rational-legal authority) is less stable than traditional authority or rational-legal authority. The reason for this is simple: once charismatic leaders die, their authority dies as well. Although a charismatic leader’s example may continue to inspire people long after the leader dies, it is difficult for another leader to come along and command people’s devotion as intensely. After the deaths of all the charismatic leaders named in the preceding paragraph, no one came close to replacing them in the hearts and minds of their followers.

Because charismatic leaders recognize that their eventual death may well undermine the nation or cause they represent, they often designate a replacement leader, who they hope will also have charismatic qualities. This new leader may be a grown child of the charismatic leader or someone else the leader knows and trusts. The danger, of course, is that any new leaders will lack sufficient charisma to have their authority accepted by the followers of the original charismatic leader. For this reason, Weber recognized that charismatic authority ultimately becomes more stable when it is evolves into traditional or rational-legal authority. Transformation into traditional authority can happen when charismatic leaders’ authority becomes accepted as residing in their bloodlines, so that their authority passes to their children and then to their grandchildren. Transformation into rational-legal authority occurs when a society ruled by a charismatic leader develops the rules and bureaucratic structures that we associate with a government. Weber used the term routinization of charisma to refer to the transformation of charismatic authority in either of these ways.

Key Takeaways

• Power refers to the ability to have one’s will carried out despite the resistance of others.
• According to Max Weber, the three types of legitimate authority are traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic.
• Charismatic authority is relatively unstable because the authority held by a charismatic leader may not easily extend to anyone else after the leader dies.

For Your Review

• Think of someone, either a person you have known or a national or historical figure, whom you regard as a charismatic leader. What is it about this person that makes her or him charismatic?
• Why is rational-legal authority generally more stable than charismatic authority?

Lanoue, D. J. (1988). From Camelot to the teflon president: Economics and presidential popularaity since 1960. New York, NY: Greenwood Press.

Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work published 1921).

Wrong, D. H. (1996). Power: Its forms, bases, and uses . New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Sociology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Political Legitimacy

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.

Next there are questions about the requirements of legitimacy. When are political institutions and the decisions made within them appropriately called legitimate? Some have argued that this question must be answered primarily on the basis of procedural features of political decision-making. Others argue that legitimacy depends—exclusively or at least in part—on the substantive values that are realized. And on what grounds is the procedure versus substance question to be settled, is it on moral grounds— relating to values such as freedom or equality—or is it on epistemic grounds—relating to the epistemic merits of how political decisions are made? A related question is: does political legitimacy demand democracy or not? Insofar as democracy is seen as necessary for political legitimacy, when are democratic decisions legitimate? Can that question be answered with reference to procedural features only, or does democratic legitimacy depend both on procedural values and on the quality of the decisions made? And what is the role of epistemic considerations in this regard? Finally, there is the question which political institutions are subject to the legitimacy requirement. Historically, legitimacy was associated with the state and institutions and decisions within the state. The contemporary literature tends to judge this as too narrow, however. This raises the question how the concept of legitimacy may apply—beyond the nation state and decisions made within it—to the international and global context.

1. Descriptive and Normative Concepts of Political Legitimacy

2.1 legitimacy and the justification of political authority, 2.2 justifying power and coercion, 2.3 political legitimacy and political obligations, 3.1 consent, 3.2 public justification and political participation, 3.3 normative facts and epistemic advantage, 4.1 democratic instrumentalism, 4.2 pure proceduralist conceptions of democratic legitimacy, 4.3 alternative conceptions of democratic legitimacy, 5.1 political nationalism, 5.2 political cosmopolitanism, other internet resources, related entries.

If legitimacy is interpreted descriptively, it refers to people’s beliefs about political authority and, sometimes, political obligations. In his sociology, Max Weber put forward a very influential account of legitimacy that excludes any recourse to normative criteria (Mommsen 1989: 20, but see Greene 2017 for an alternative reading). According to Weber, that a political regime is legitimate means that its participants have certain beliefs or faith (“Legitimitätsglaube”) in regard to it: “the basis of every system of authority, and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey, is a belief, a belief by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent prestige” (Weber 1964: 382). As is well known, Weber distinguishes among three main sources of legitimacy—understood as the acceptance both of authority and of the need to obey its commands. People may have faith in a particular political or social order because it has been there for a long time (tradition), because they have faith in the rulers (charisma), or because they trust its legality—specifically the rationality of the rule of law (Weber 2009 [1918]; 1964). Weber identifies legitimacy as an important explanatory category for social science, because faith in a particular social order produces social regularities that are more stable than those that result from the pursuit of self-interest or from habitual rule-following (Weber 1964: 124).

In contrast to Weber’s descriptive concept, the normative concept of political legitimacy refers to some benchmark of acceptability or justification of political power or authority and—possibly—obligation. On one view, held by John Rawls (1993) and Arthur Ripstein (2004), for example, legitimacy refers, in the first instance, to the justification of coercive political power. Whether a political body such as a state is legitimate and whether citizens have political obligations towards it depends on whether the coercive political power that the state exercises is justified. On a widely held alternative view, legitimacy is linked to the justification of political authority. On this view, political bodies such as states may be effective, or de facto , authorities, without being legitimate. They claim the right to rule and to create obligations to be obeyed, and as long as these claims are met with sufficient acquiescence, they are authoritative. Legitimate authority, on this view, differs from merely effective or de facto authority in that it actually holds the right to rule and creates political obligations (e.g., Raz 1986). On some views, even legitimate authority is not sufficient to create political obligations. The thought is that a political authority (such as a state) may be permitted to issue commands that citizens are not obligated to obey (Dworkin 1986: 191). Based on a view of this sort, some have argued that legitimate political authority only gives rise to political obligations if additional normative conditions are satisfied (e.g. Wellman 1996; Edmundson 1998; Buchanan 2002).

There is sometimes a tendency in the literature to equate the normative concept of legitimacy with justice. Some explicitly define legitimacy as a criterion of minimal justice (e.g., Hampton 1998; Buchanan 2002). Someone might claim, for example, that while political institutions such as states are often unjust, only a just state is morally acceptable and legitimate in this sense. Unfortunately, there is sometimes also a tendency to blur the distinction between the two concepts, and a lot of confusion arises from that. Rawls (1993, 1995) clearly distinguishes between the two concepts. In his view, while justice and legitimacy are related—they draw on the same set of political values—they have different domains and legitimacy makes weaker demands than justice (1993: 225; 1995: 175ff.). Political institutions may be legitimate but unjust, but the converse is not possible: just political institutions are necessarily legitimate (see also Langvatn 2016 on this). On other views, legitimacy and justice have different normative foundations (e.g., Simmons 2001; Pettit 2012). According to Pettit (2012: 130ff), a state is just if it imposes a social order that promotes freedom as non-domination for all its citizens. It is legitimate if it imposes a social order in an appropriate way. A state that fails to impose a social order in an appropriate way, however just the social order may be, is illegitimate. Vice versa, a legitimate state may fail to impose a just social order.

Realist political theorists criticize any tendency to blur the distinction between legitimacy and justice (e.g., Rossi and Sleat 2014). They diagnose it as a sign of misplaced “political moralism” (Williams 2005; Horton 2010), or, relatedly, as a misleading interpretation of political theory as a branch of applied ethics (e.g., Honig 1993). But they also want to carve out an alternative to a purely descriptive interpretation of legitimacy. Bernard Williams’s claim (2005: 4ff) that political institutions are subject to a “basic legitimation demand” has been very influential in this regard. According to Williams, the first political question is how a state provides basic political goods such as security and stability and the conditions for cooperation. That it provides these goods is a necessary requirement for legitimacy, but it is not sufficient. A state is also under the normative expectation to justify how it provides these goods. That normative expectation is the distinctively political basic legitimation demand.

By interpreting the concept of political legitimacy along those lines, political realists lend support to those who have questioned a sharp distinction between the descriptive and normative concepts of legitimacy (e.g., Habermas 1979; Beetham 1991; Horton 2012). The objection to a strictly normative concept of legitimacy is that it is of only limited use in understanding actual processes of legitimation. The charge is that philosophers tend to focus too much on the general conditions necessary for the justification of political institutions but neglect the historical actualization of the justificatory process. In Jürgen Habermas’ words (Habermas 1979: 205): “Every general theory of justification remains peculiarly abstract in relation to the historical forms of legitimate domination. … Is there an alternative to this historical injustice of general theories, on the one hand, and the standardlessness of mere historical understanding, on the other?” The objection to a purely descriptive concept such as Weber’s is that it neglects people’s second order beliefs about legitimacy—their beliefs, not just about the actual legitimacy of a particular political institution, but about the justifiability of this institution, i.e. about what is necessary for legitimacy. According to Beetham, a “power relationship is not legitimate because people believe in its legitimacy, but because it can be justified in terms of their beliefs” (Beetham 1991: 11). As Tommie Shelby (2007) has highlighted, from the point of view of oppressed minorities political institutions often lack legitimacy because they (rightly) perceive the social order to be unjust.

A key claim of political realism is that while legitimacy is a normative property of political institutions or decisions, its normativity is not (just) moral (e.g., Rossi 2012, Sleat 2014). In support of this claim, some realists argue that the basic legitimation demand can’t be satisfied just by appeal to moral arguments, for example because political processes are necessary to forge political agreements (Stears 2007). Others focus on the role of epistemic normativity (see the discussion in Burelli and Destri 2022). But, as Leader Maynard and Worsnip (2018) ask, is there a distinct political normativity that political realists could resort to? Or does normative political philosophy have resources to address the realists’ worries? A possible reply to these questions is that realist political theory is less concerned with the nature of normativity than with drawing attention to neglected topics in political theory (Baderin 2014; Jubb 2019). But this raises the further question whether there is a unified project at the core of political realism, or whether it is better seen as the intersection of different projects motivated by a range of meta-normative, normative, and political concerns.

2. 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.

The normative concept of political legitimacy is often seen as related to the justification of authority. The main function of political legitimacy, on this interpretation, is to explain the difference between merely effective or de facto authority and legitimate authority.

John Locke put forward such an interpretation of legitimacy. Locke’s starting-point is a state of nature in which all individuals are equally free to act within the constraints of natural law and no individual is subject to the will of another. As Rawls (2007: 129) characterizes Locke’s understanding of the state of nature, it is “a state of equal right, all being kings.” Natural law, while manifest in the state of nature, is not sufficiently specific to rule a society and cannot enforce itself when violated, however. The solution to this problem is a social contract that transfers political authority to a civil state that can realize and secure the natural law. According to Locke, and contrary to his predecessor Thomas Hobbes, the social contract thus does not create authority. Political authority is embodied in individuals and pre-exists in the state of nature. The social contract transfers the authority they each enjoy in the state of nature to a particular political body.

While political authority thus pre-exists in the state of nature, legitimacy is a concept that is specific to the civil state. Because the criterion of legitimacy that Locke proposes is historical, however, what counts as legitimate authority remains connected to the state of nature. The legitimacy of political authority in the civil state depends, according to Locke, on whether the transfer of authority has happened in the right way. Whether the transfer has happened in the right way depends on individuals’ consent: “no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent” (Locke 1980 [1690]: 52). Anyone who has given their express or tacit consent to the social contract is bound to obey a state’s laws (Locke 1980 [1690]: 63). Locke understands the consent criterion to apply not just to the original institutionalization of a political authority—what Rawls (2007: 124) calls “originating consent”. It also applies to the ongoing evaluation of the performance of a political regime—Rawls (2007: 124) calls this “joining consent”.

Although Locke emphasises consent, consent is not, however, sufficient for legitimate authority because an authority that suspends the natural law is necessarily illegitimate (e.g., Simmons 1976). On some interpretations of Locke (e.g., Pitkin 1965), consent is not even necessary for legitimate political authority; the absence of consent is only a marker of illegitimacy. Whether an actual political regime respects the constraints of the natural law is thus at least one factor that determines its legitimacy.

This criterion of legitimacy is negative: it offers an account of when effective authority ceases to be legitimate. When a political authority fails to secure consent or oversteps the boundaries of the natural law, it ceases to be legitimate and, therefore, there is no longer an obligation to obey its commands. For Locke—unlike for Hobbes—political authority can thus not be absolute.

The contemporary literature has developed Locke’s ideas in several ways. John Simmons (2001) uses them to argue that we should distinguish between the moral justification of states in general and the political legitimacy of actual states. We will come back to this point in section 3.2. Joseph Raz links legitimacy to the justification of political authority. According to Raz, political authority is just a special case of the more general concept of authority (1986, 1995, 2006). He defines authority in relation to a claim—of a person or an agency—to generate what he calls pre-emptive reasons. Such reasons replace other reasons for action that people might have. For example, if a teacher asks her students to do some homework, she expects her say-so to give the students reason to do the homework.

Authority is effective if it gets people to act on the reasons it generates. The difference between effective and legitimate authority, on Raz’ view, is that the former merely purports to change the reasons that apply to others, while legitimate authority actually has the capacity to change these reasons. Legitimate authority satisfies a pre-emption thesis: “The fact that an authority requires performance of an action is a reason for its performance which is not to be added to all other relevant reasons when assessing what to do, but should exclude and take the place of some of them” (Raz 1986: 46). (There are limits to what even a legitimate authority can rightfully order others to do, which is why it does not necessarily replace all relevant reasons.)

When is effective or de facto authority legitimate? In other words, what determines whether the pre-emption thesis is satisfied? Raz’ answer is captured in two further theses. The “dependence thesis” states that the justification of political authority depends on the normative reasons that apply to those under its rule directly, independently of the authority’s directives. Building on the dependence thesis, the “normal justification thesis” then states that political authority is justified if it enables those subject to it to better comply with the reasons that apply to them anyway. In full, the normal justification thesis says: “The normal way to establish that a person has authority over another involves showing that the alleged subject is likely to better comply with the reasons which apply to him (other than the alleged authoritative directive) if he accepts the directives of the alleged authority as authoritatively binding and tries to follow them, rather than by trying to follow the reasons which apply to him directly” (Raz 1986: 53). The normal justification thesis explains why those governed by a legitimate authority ought to treat its directives as binding. It thus follows as a corollary of the normal justification thesis that such an authority generates a duty to be obeyed. Raz calls his conception the “service conception” of authority (1986: 56). Note that even though legitimate authority is defined as a special case of effective authority, only the former is appropriately described as a serving its subjects. Illegitimate—but effective—authority does not serve those it aims to govern, although it may purport to do so.

William Edmundson formulates this way of linking authority and legitimacy via a condition he calls the warranty thesis: “If being an X entails claiming to F , then being a legitimate X entails truly claiming to F .” (Edmundson 1998: 39). Being an X here stands for “a state”, or “an authority”. And “to F ” stands for “to create a duty to be obeyed”, for example. The idea expressed by the warranty thesis is that legitimacy morally justifies an independently existing authority such that the claims of the authority become moral obligations.

Those who link political legitimacy to the problem of justifying authority tend to think of political coercion as only a means that legitimate states may use to secure their authority. As Leslie Green puts it: “Coercion threats provide secondary, reinforcing motivation when the political order fails in its primary normative technique of authoritative guidance” (Green 1988: 75). According to a second important view, held by Rawls (1993), for example, the main function of legitimacy is precisely to justify coercive power. (For an excellent discussion of the two interpretations of legitimacy and a defense of the coercion-based interpretation, see Ripstein 2004; see also Hampton 1998.) On coercion-based interpretations, the main problem that a conception of legitimacy aims to solve is how to distinguish the rightful use of political power from mere coercion. Whether a political body such as a state is legitimate and whether citizens have political obligations towards it depends, on this view on whether the coercive political power that the state exercises is justified. Again, there are different ways in which this idea might be understood.

In Thomas Hobbes’ influential account, political authority is created by the social contract. In the state of nature, everyone’s self-preservation is under threat, and this makes it rational for all to consent to a covenant that authorizes a sovereign who can guarantee their protection and to transfer their rights to this sovereign—an individual or a group of individuals. When there is no such sovereign, one may be created by a covenant—Hobbes calls this “sovereignty by institution”. But political authority may also be established by the promise of all to obey a threatening power (“sovereignty by acquisition”; see Leviathan , chapter 17). Both manners of creating a sovereign are equally legitimate. And political authority will be legitimate as long as the sovereign ensures the protection of the citizens, as Hobbes believes that the natural right to self-preservation cannot be relinquished ( Leviathan , chapter 21). Beyond that, however, there can be no further questions about the legitimacy of the sovereign. In particular, there is no distinction between effective authority and legitimate authority in Hobbes’ thought. It might even be argued that Hobbes fails to distinguish between legitimate authority and the mere exercise of power (Korsgaard 1997: 29; see chapter 30 of Leviathan , however, for an account of the quality of the sovereign’s rule).

Another way in which the relation between legitimacy and the creation of authority may be understood is that the attempt to rule without legitimacy is an attempt to exercise coercive power—not authority. Such a view can be found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work. Legitimacy, for Rousseau, justifies the state’s exercise of coercive power and creates an obligation to obey. Rousseau contrasts a legitimate social order with a system of rules that is merely the expression of power. Coercive power is primarily a feature of the civil state. While there are some forms of coercive power even in the state of nature—for example the power of parents over their children—Rousseau assumes that harmful coercive power arises primarily in the civil state and that this creates the problem of legitimacy. In the first chapter of the first book of On the Social Contract he remarks that while “[m]an is born free”, the civil state he observes makes everyone a slave. Rousseau’s main question is under what conditions a civil state, which uses coercive power to back up its laws, can be thought of as freeing citizens from this serfdom. Such a state would be legitimate. As he puts it in the opening sentence of the Social Contract , “I want to inquire whether there can be some legitimate and sure rule of administration in the civil order, taking men as they are and laws as they might be.”

Rousseau’s account of legitimacy is importantly different from Locke’s in that Rousseau does not attach normativity to the process through which a civil state emerges from the state of nature. Legitimate political authority is created by convention, reached within the civil state. Specifically, Rousseau suggests that legitimacy arises from the democratic justification of the laws of the civil state ( Social Contract I:6; cf. section 3.3. below).

For Immanuel Kant, as for Hobbes, political authority is created by the establishment of political institutions in the civil state. It does not pre-exist in individuals in the state of nature. What exists in the pre-civil social state, according to Kant, is the moral authority of each individual qua rational being and a moral obligation to form a civil state. Establishing a civil state is “in itself an end (that each ought to have )” (Kant, Theory and Practice 8:289; see also Perpetual Peace , Appendix I). Kant regards the civil state as a necessary first step toward a moral order (the “ethical commonwealth”). It helps people conform to certain rules by eliminating what today would be called the free-riding problem or the problem of partial compliance. By creating a coercive order of public legal justice, “a great step is taken toward morality (though it is not yet a moral step), toward being attached to this concept of duty even for its own sake” (Kant, Perpetual Peace 8:376, notes to Appendix I; see also Riley 1982: 129 f ).

The civil state, according to Kant, establishes the rights necessary to secure equal freedom. Unlike for Locke and his contemporary followers, however, coercive power is not a secondary feature of the civil state, necessary to back up laws. According to Kant, coercion is part of the idea of rights. The thought can be explained as follows. Coercion is defined as a restriction of the freedom to pursue one’s own ends. Any right of a person—independently of whether it is respected or has been violated—implies a restriction for others. (cf. Kant, Theory and Practice , Part 2; Ripstein 2004: 8; Flikschuh 2008: 389f). Coercion, in this view, is thus not merely a means for the civil state to enforce rights as defenders of an authority-based concept of legitimacy claim. Instead, according to Kant, it is constitutive of the civil state. This understanding of rights links Kant’s conception of legitimacy to the justification of coercion.

Legitimacy, for Kant, depends on a particular interpretation of the social contract. For Kant, the social contract which establishes the civil state is not an actual event. He accepts David Hume’s objection to Locke that the civil state is often established in an act of violence (Hume “Of the Original Contract”). Kant invokes the social contract, instead, as the test “of any public law’s conformity with right” (Kant Theory and Practice 8:294). The criterion is the following: each law should be such that all individuals could have consented to it. The social contract, according to Kant, is thus a hypothetical thought experiment, meant to capture an idea of public reason. As such, it sets the standard for what counts as legitimate political authority. Because of his particular interpretation of the social contract, Kant is not a social contract theorist in the strict sense. The idea of a contract is nevertheless relevant for his understanding of legitimacy. (On the difference between voluntaristic and rationalistic strands in liberalism, see Waldron 1987.)

Kant, unlike Hobbes, recognizes the difference between legitimate and effective authority. For the head of the civil state is under an obligation to obey public reason and to enact only laws to which all individuals could consent. If he violates this obligation, however, he still holds authority, even if his authority ceases to be legitimate. This view is best explained in relation to Kant’s often criticized position on the right to revolution. Kant famously denied that there is a right to revolution (Kant, Perpetual Peace , Appendix II; for a recent discussion, see Flikschuh 2008). Kant stresses that while “a people”—as united in the civil state—is sovereign, its individual members are under the obligation to obey the head of the state thus established. This obligation is such that it is incompatible with a right to revolution. Kant offers a transcendental argument for his position (Kant Perpetual Peace , Appendix II; Arendt 1992). A right to revolution would be in contradiction with the idea that individuals are bound by public law, but without the idea of citizens being bound by public law, there cannot be a civil state—only anarchy. As mentioned earlier, however, there is a duty to establish a civil state. Kant’s position implies that the obligation of individuals to obey a head of state is not conditioned upon the ruler’s performance. In particular, the obligation to obey does not cease when the laws are unjust.

Kant’s position on the right to revolution may suggest that he regards political authority as similarly absolute as Hobbes. But Kant stresses that the head of state is bound by the commands of public reason. This is manifest in his insistence on freedom of the pen: “a citizen must have, with the approval of the ruler himself, the authorization to make known publicly his opinions about what it is in the ruler’s arrangements that seems to him to be a wrong against the commonwealth” (Kant Theory and Practice 8:304). While there is no right to revolution, political authority is only legitimate if the head of state respects the social contract. But political obligations arise even from illegitimate authority. If the head of state acts in violation of the social contract and hence of public reason, for example by restricting citizens’ freedom of political criticism, citizens are still obligated to obey.

In 2004, Ripstein argued that much of the contemporary literature on political legitimacy has been dominated by a focus on the justification of authority, rather than coercive political power (Ripstein 2004). In the literature since then, it looks as if the tables are turning, especially if one considers the debates on international and global legitimacy (section 5). But prominent earlier coercion-based accounts include those by Nagel (1987) and by contemporary Kantians such as Rawls and Habermas (to be discussed in sections 3.3. and 4.3., respectively).

Let me briefly mention other important coercion-based interpretations. Jean Hampton (1998; drawing on Anscombe 1981) offers an elegant contemporary explication of Hobbes’ view. According to her, political authority “is invented by a group of people who perceive that this kind of special authority as necessary for the collective solution of certain problems of interaction in their territory and whose process of state creation essentially involves designing the content and structure of that authority so that it meets what they take to be their needs” (Hampton 1998: 77). Her theory links the authority of the state to its ability to enforce a solution to coordination and cooperation problems. Coercion is the necessary feature that enables the state to provide an effective solution to these problems, and the entitlement to use coercion is what constitutes the authority of the state. The entitlement to use coercion distinguishes such minimally legitimate political authority from a mere use of power. Hampton draws a further distinction between minimal legitimacy and what she calls full moral legitimacy, which obtains when political authority is just.

Buchanan (2002) also argues that legitimacy is concerned with the justification of coercive power. Buchanan points out that this makes legitimacy a more fundamental normative concept than authority. Like Hampton, he advocates a moralized interpretation of legitimacy. According to him, “an entity has political legitimacy if and only if it is morally justified in wielding political power” (2002: 689). Political authority, in his approach, obtains if an entity is legitimate in this sense and if some further conditions, relating to political obligation, are met (2002: 691). Anna Stilz (2009) offers a coercion-centered account of state legitimacy that draws on both Kant and Rousseau.

Historically speaking, the dominant view has been that legitimate political authority entails political obligations. Locke, for example, writes: “every man, by consenting with others to make one body politic under one government, puts himself under an obligation to every one of that society to submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded by it; or else this original compact, whereby he with others incorporates into one society, would signify nothing, and be no compact if he be left free and under no other ties than he was in before in the state of nature” (Locke 2009 [1690]: 52f).

While this is still the view many hold, not all do. Some take the question of what constitutes legitimate authority to be distinct from the question of what political obligations people have. Ronald Dworkin (1986: 191) treats political obligations as a fundamental normative concept in its own right. What he calls “associative obligations” arise, not from legitimate political authority, but directly from membership in a political community. (For a critical discussion of this account, see Simmons 2001; Wellman 1996.)

Arthur Applbaum (2019) offers a conceptual argument to challenge the view that legitimate political authority entails an obligation to obey. Applbaum grants that legitimate political authority has the capacity to change the normative status of those under its rule, as Raz (1986), for example, has influentially argued, and that this capacity should be interpreted as a moral power in Hohfeld’s sense, not as a claim right to rule. But, Applbaum argues, Hohfeldian powers, unlike rights, are not correlated with duties; they are correlated with liabilities. On Applbaum’s view, legitimate political authority thus has the capacity to create a liability for those under its rule, but not an obligation. To be liable to legitimate political authority means to not be free from the authority’s power or control. To be sure, the liability might be to be subject to a duty, but to be liable to be put under a duty to obey should not be confused with being under a duty to obey (see also Perry 2013 on this distinction).

Views that dissociate legitimate authority from political obligation have some appeal to those who aim to counter Robert Paul Wolff’s influential anarchist argument. The argument highlights what today is sometimes called the subjection problem (Perry 2013): how can autonomous individuals be under a general—content-independent—obligation to subject their will to the will of someone else? A content-independent obligation to obey the state is an obligation to obey a state’s directives as such, independently of their content. Wolff (1970) argues that because there cannot be such a general obligation to obey the state, states are necessarily illegitimate.

Edmundson (1998) has a first response to the anarchist challenge. He argues that while legitimacy establishes a justification for the state to issue directives, it does not create even a prima facie duty to obey its commands. He claims that the moral duty to obey the commands of legitimate political authority arises only if additional conditions are met.

Simmons (2001) has a different response to Wolff. Simmons draws a distinction between the moral justification of states and the political legitimacy of a particular, historically realized, state and its directives. According to Simmons, the state’s justification depends on its moral defensibility. If it can successfully be shown that having a state is morally better than not having a state (Simmons 2001: 125), the state is justified. 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. A particular state’s legitimacy, understood as the capacity to generate and enforce a duty to obey, depends on citizens’ actual consent. 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 2001: 137).

3. Sources of Political Legitimacy

Insofar as legitimacy, understood normatively, determines which political institutions and which decisions made within them are justified or acceptable, and, in some cases, what kind of obligations people who are governed by these institutions incur, there is the question of what makes political institutions and political decisions legitimate. As we’ll see, this question has both a normative and a meta-normative dimension (see Peter 2023 for more on this distinction). 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 1998; Hampton 1998). The following passage from Grotius’ On the Law of War and Peace expresses the modern perspective: “But as there are several Ways of Living, some better than others, and every one may chuse which he pleases of all those Sorts; so a People may chuse what Form of Government they please: Neither is the Right which the Sovereign has over his Subjects to be measured by this or that Form, of which divers Men have different Opinions, but by the Extent of the Will of those who conferred it upon him” (cited by Tuck 1993: 193). It was Locke’s version of social contract theory that elevated consent to the main source of the legitimacy of political authority.

Raz helpfully distinguishes among three ways in which the relation between consent and legitimate political authority may be understood (1995: 356): (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. There is a question, however, whether versions of (ii) and (iii) are best understood as versions of a consent theory of political legitimacy, or whether they are versions of an alternative justificationist theory (Stark 2000; Peter 2023).

Locke and his contemporary followers such as Robert Nozick (1974) or Simmons (2001), but also Rousseau and his followers defend a version of (i)—the most typical form that consent theories take. Amanda Greene (2016) defends a version of this view she calls the quality consent view. One question that all versions of (i) must address is whether consent must be explicit or whether tacit consent, expressed by residency, is sufficient (see Puryear 2021 for a defence of the latter).

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. section 3.2).

David Estlund (2008: 117ff) defends a version of hypothetical consent theory that matches category (iii). What he calls “normative consent” is a theory that regards non-consent to authority, under certain conditions as invalid. 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. The work that normative consent theory does in Estlund’s account is that it contributes to the justification of the authority of the democratic collective over those who disagree with certain democratically approved laws.

Although consent theory has been dominating for a long time, there are many well-known objections to it. As we will explain more fully in the next section, Simmons (2001) argues that hypothetical consent theories (and, presumably, normative consent theories, too) conflate moral justification with legitimation, and that only actual consent can legitimize political institutions. Other objections, especially to Lockean versions, are about as old as consent theory itself. David Hume, in his essay “Of the Original Contract”, and many after him object to Locke that consent is not feasible, and that actual states have almost always arisen from acts of violence. The attempt to legitimize political authority via consent is thus, at best, wishful thinking (Wellman 1996). What is worse, it may obscure problematic structures of subordination (Pateman 1988). Hume’s own solution to this problem was, like Bentham later, to propose to justify political authority with reference to its beneficial consequences (see section 3.3).

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. Interest in public reason accounts started with Rawls’ Political Liberalism, but Rawls developed the idea more fully in later works. Rawls’ starting-point is the following problem of legitimacy (Rawls 2001: 41): “in the light of what reasons and values … can citizens legitimately exercise … coercive power over one another?” The solution to this problem that Rawls proposes is the following “liberal principle of legitimacy”: “political power is legitimate only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution (written or unwritten) the essentials of which all citizens, as reasonable and rational, can endorse in the light of their common human reason” (Rawls 2001: 41; see Michelman 2022 for an extensive discussion of constitutional essentials).

Rawls’ idea of public reason, which is at the core of the liberal principle of legitimacy, rests on the method of “political”—as opposed to “metaphysical”—justification that Rawls has developed in response to critics of his theory of justice as fairness (Rawls 1993). This means that public reason should be “freestanding” in the same way as his theory of justice is. 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 2001: 26). 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.

Simmons (2001) criticizes Rawls’ approach for mistakenly blurring the distinction between justifying the state and political legitimacy (see also section 2.3.). 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. As Hershovitz puts it in his critique of the Razian approach to political legitimacy, in a democracy there is no sharp division between the “binders” and the “bound” (2003: 210f). The political authority of democracy is thus entailed by some account of the conditions under which citizens may legitimately exercise coercive power over one another (see Viehoff 2014 and Kolodny 2023 on this question). But even if Simmons’ objection can be refuted in this way, a further problem for public reason accounts is whether they can successfully show that some form of public justification is indeed required for political legitimacy (see Enoch 2015).

Recent public reason accounts have developed Rawls’ original idea in different ways (see also the entry on public reason). 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.g., Quong 2011; Hartley and Watson 2018). 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 either relies on a very restrictive characterization of reasonable persons or ends up with a very limited domain for legitimate political coercion.

Rawls’ conception of political legitimacy can also be understood in terms of procedural reasons (Peter 2008). 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 that justify a decision. For example, if public reason 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 2011; Vallier 2011; Vallier and Muldoon 2020). 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 only if it has been made in a process that allows for equal participation of all relevant persons. They thus see political legitimacy as dependent on the participation or influence of all, to paraphrase Bernard Manin’s (1987) expression, not on the will of all, as consent theories do, or on a justification all can access, as public reason accounts do. Older accounts of this kind focus on democratic participation (Pateman 1970). Newer accounts include deliberative democracy accounts (Manin 1987), Philipp Pettit’s equal control view (Pettit 2012), and Lafont’s theory of democratic legitimacy (Lafont 2019).

Rousseau’s solution to the problem of how to explain the legitimacy of political decisions has influenced many contemporary democratic theorists (see section 4.3.). One of the important departures from Locke’s version of social contract theory that Rousseau proposes is that tacit consent is not sufficient for political legitimacy. Without citizens’ active participation in the justification of a state’s laws, Rousseau maintains, there is no legitimacy. According to Rousseau, one’s will cannot be represented, as this would distort the general will, which alone is the source of legitimacy: “The engagements that bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual… the general will, to be truly such, should be general in its object as well as in its essence; … it should come from all to apply to all; and … it loses its natural rectitude when it is directed towards any individual, determinate object” (Rousseau, Social Contract , II:4; see also ibid . I:3 and Rawls 2007: 231f).

Rousseau distinguishes among a citizen’s private will, which reflects personal interests, a citizen’s general will, which reflects an interpretation of the common good, and the general will, which truly reflects the common good. 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? Rousseau’s answer to this question is the following. On Rousseau’s view, citizens can—and will want to—learn from democratic decisions. 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.

The theories of political legitimacy reviewed in the previous two sections take the citizens’ will, whether expressed through their actual consent, supported by shared or converging reasons, or established through processes of political participation, as the ground of political legitimacy. While such will-based conceptions have dominated the philosophical literature on political legitimacy, they are not the only conceptions on offer. There are two main alternatives, as well as hybrid conceptions (see Peter 2023). A first alternative are fact-based conceptions of political legitimacy, according to which the legitimacy of political institutions and decisions depends on whether they accord with normative facts. Utilitarian theories, which focus on the beneficial consequences of political institutions and the decisions made within them, are a good example. According to belief-based conceptions, as articulated in epistocratic conceptions and in some epistemic theories of democracy, the source of political legitimacy is some form of epistemic advantage that supports the justification of political decisions. In this section, we expand on the two main alternatives to will-based conceptions of political legitimacy.

In the utilitarian view, legitimate political authority should be grounded on the principle of utility. The relevant normative facts are facts concerning the maximization of happiness or utility. 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 1998: 160; Barnard 2001: 66). Where Thomasius differs from the utilitarians, however, is in his attempt to identify a distinctively political—not moral or legal—source of legitimacy. He developed the idea of “decorum” into a theory of how people should relate to one another in the political context. Decorum is best described as a principle of “civic mutuality” (Barnard 2001: 65): “You treat others as you would expect them to treat you” (Thomasius, Foundations of the Law of Nature and of Nations , quoted by Barnard 2001: 65). By thus distinguishing legitimacy from legality and justice, Thomasius adopted an approach that was considerably ahead of his time.

Jeremy Bentham (in Anarchical Fallacies ) 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 2000.)

A well-known problem with the view that Bentham articulates is that it justifies restrictions of rights that liberals find unacceptable. John Stuart Mill’s answer to this objection consists, on the one hand, in an argument for the compatibility between utilitarianism and the protection of liberty rights and, on the other, in an instrumentalist defense of democratic political authority based on the principle of utility. 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 1992; Ten 1998).

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 1996; see also Turner 2014). Mill’s view of the instrumental value of (deliberative) democracy is expressed in the following passage of the first chapter of On Liberty : “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided that the end be their improvement and the means justified by actually effecting that end. 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.” Deliberation is important, according to Mill, because of his belief in the power of ideas—in what Habermas would later call the force of the better argument (Habermas 1990: 158ff). Deliberation should keep partisan interests, which could threaten legitimacy by undermining the general happiness, in check: “The representative system ought … not to allow any of the various sectional interests to be so powerful as to be capable of prevailing against truth and justice and the other sectional interests combined. There ought always to be such a balance preserved among personal interests as may render any one of them dependent for its successes, on carrying with it at least a large proportion of those who act on higher motives, and more comprehensive and distant views” (Mill, Collected Works XIX: 447, cited by Ten 1998: 379).

Many are not convinced that such instrumentalist reasoning provides a satisfactory account of political legitimacy. Rawls (1971:175ff) and Jeremy Waldron (1987: 143ff) 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.

Can fact-based conceptions of political legitimacy address this problem? Fair play theories offer one solution to this problem (see Klosko 2004 and the entry on political obligation ). Wellman’s (1996) samaritan account of political legitimacy is also an attempt to overcome this problem. In his account, a state’s legitimacy depends on it being justified to use coercion to enforce its laws. His suggestion is that the justification of the state can be grounded in the samaritan duty to help others in need. The thought is that “what ultimately legitimizes a state’s imposition upon your liberty is not merely the services it provides you , but the benefits it provides others ” (Wellman 1996: 213; his emphasis). Wellman argues that because “political society is the only vehicle with which people can escape the perils of the state of nature” (Wellman 1996: 216), people have a samaritan duty to provide to one another the benefits of a state. Associated restrictions of their liberty by the state, Wellman claims, are legitimate.

Perfectionist theories offer another alternative. Perfectionist conceptions can be found in ancient Chinese philosophy (see Chan 2013; Jiang 2021). The best-known perfectionist theory in contemporary Western political philosophy is Raz’ service conception of legitimate authority (section 2.1). 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. According to Raz (1995: 359), “[g]overnments decide what is best for their subjects and present them with the results as binding conclusions that they are bound to follow.” The justification for this view that Raz gives (“the normal justification thesis”) is, as explained above, that if the authority is legitimate, its directives are such that they help those governed to better comply with reasons that apply to them. (For criticisms of this approach, see Hershovitz 2003 and 2011, Nussbaum 2011, and Quong 2011).

Perfectionist theories are often cast as versions of fact-based conceptions of political legitimacy. But, as Plato highlighted in the Republic , there isn’t just the question of what the right political decisions are, whether construed as those that maximize utility, honor our duties, or realize some perfectionist ideal. There is also the question of who should be in charge. And the answer that Plato gave to that second question echoes a belief-based conception of political legitimacy: it’s those who know best and who are capable of ruling accordingly (Estlund 2003). Seen in that light, even Raz’ service conception of political legitimacy appears as a belief-based conception. It holds that “epistemic abstinence” is not an option (Raz 1995) and that political authority is legitimate if held by those who know best what reasons apply to all citizens and exercised accordingly (see Peter 2023 for this interpretation of Raz’ service conception).

Belief-based conceptions of political legitimacy span versions of epistocracy as well as versions of epistemic democracy. I’ll have more to say about epistemic democracy in section 4, so let me focus on epistocratic conceptions here. Epistocratic conceptions of political legitimacy are best understood in opposition to the democratic commitment to strict political equality among the citizens (see section 4). The idea is captured by Jason Brennan’s “antiauthority tenet” (Brennan 2016: 17), which echoes David Estlund’s “authority tenet” (2008: 30): “When some citizens are morally unreasonable, ignorant, or incompetent about politics, this justifies not permitting them to exercise political authority over others.”

Epistocratic conceptions of political legitimacy can support the legitimacy of authoritarianism, assuming that there is an authoritarian elite that has the right kind of political knowledge and is able to effectively rule on that basis. We should not equate epistocracy with authoritarianism, however, as epistocracy is also compatible with a Millian plurality voting scheme and similar political regimes. Still, as highlighted by Ross Mittiga (2022) and Fabienne Peter (2023), the question has to be addressed whether non-democratic political decision-making can be legitimate in circumstances where the threats to citizens’ lives are enormous (through climate change, for example, or pandemics), the evidence for what needs to be done is sufficiently robust, and the democratic process is failing to address the issues.

An important objection to belief-based conceptions of political legitimacy is that they conflate political authority and epistemic authority (Estlund 2008, Darwall 2010, Lafont 2019; see also section 4 below). Raz (2010) rejects this objection, arguing that it only shows that epistemic authority is not sufficient for political authority, not that it is not necessary. Peter (2023) argues that even if this objection can be refuted, belief-based conceptions of political legitimacy often (but not necessarily always) fail because political decision-making remains epistemically underdetermined.

4. Political Legitimacy and Democracy

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 (2004) 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 main alternative in contemporary political philosophy is a form of proceduralism according to which democracy is necessary for political legitimacy, independently of its instrumental value (Buchanan 2002). 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 philosophers 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 (see section 3.3). If democracy does not contribute to better outcomes than an alternative decision-making procedure, it is not necessary for political legitimacy. The instrumentalist accounts of Richard Arneson (2003) and Steven Wall (2007), 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 it treats political equality as less important than the other kinds of equality that inform the perfectionist standard. This is implausible to those who take political equality to be one of the most important egalitarian values (e.g., Rawls 1993; Buchanan 2002; Christiano 2008). In addition, anti-democratic instrumentalism is at odds with the view that many democrats hold—that democratic procedures create or constitute political authority (Viehoff 2014, Kolodny 2023).

Instrumentalist defenses of democracy aim to show that democratic decision-making procedures are legitimate because they are best able to produce the right outcomes. Many of those arguments for the legitimacy of democracy focus on the (instrumental) epistemic value of democratic decision-making procedures. I’ll discuss these in a moment. But, first, it’s important to note that not all do. A fact-based version of democratic instrumentalism holds that democratic decision-processes are legitimate to the extent that they, in fact, promote morally good or just outcomes. Amartya Sen’s finding that democracies prevent famines illustrates the idea (Sen 1999). Brinkmann (2019) argues that there is an indirect version of instrumentalism about political legitimacy, which ties legitimacy to justice, but that is less vulnerable to standard objections against instrumentalism. This indirect instrumentalism, he argues, can support the legitimacy of democratic procedures.

Epistemic justifications of democracy do not always target the legitimacy of democracy. Some just aim to add to our overall understanding of the justification of democracy, without claiming that the epistemic argument provided is sufficient to establish the legitimacy of democracy. Some pragmatist epistemic defences of democracy, which need not be instrumentalist, are best interpreted along those lines (e.g., Misak 2004, Talisse 2009). But to the extent that they do target legitimacy, epistemic instrumentalist defenses of democracy rely on what Estlund calls a “correctness theory of democratic legitimacy” (Estlund 2008: 99). According to this theory, democracy is necessary for legitimacy to the extent that it generates political decisions that are correct or more likely to be correct.

The best-known epistemic instrumentalist defense of democracy draws on the Condorcet jury theorem (see Goodin and Spiekermann 2019 for a comprehensive recent discussion). 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. Bernard Grofman and Scott Feld (1988) interpret the Condorcet jury theorem as an explanation of Rousseau’s theory of how a democratic decision reflects the general will.

In addition to arguments based on the Condorcet jury theorem, there are other ways to defend the instrumental epistemic value of democracy. The main alternative to the jury theorem is a diversity-based mechanism. Hélène Landemore (2012, 2020) draws on work by Lu Hong and Scott Page (2004) to argue that by bringing together diverse perspectives, democratic decision-making can outperform decision-making by less diverse groups, e.g., groups of experts.

Cristina Lafont (2019) objects that such epistemic instrumentalist arguments misconstrue the grounds of political legitimacy, echoing objections against epistocracy (section 3.3). According to Lafont, epistemic arguments for democracy imply that citizens ought to defer once the correct decision is identified. But, Lafont argues, the unique legitimacy of democracy stems from honoring each citizen’s equal political authoritativeness and seeing each citizen as an addressee of political justification, not as a co-supplier of information for tracking a correct answer to a question. This blocks a requirement to blindly defer to others – a point she argues is lost in epistemic instrumentalist theories of democratic legitimacy.

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 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 May’s defense of majority rule (May 1952) relies on a view of this sort (see also Dahl 1956).

On a deliberative account of democracy, legitimacy depends, at least in part, on the process of public deliberation (Manin 1987; Bohman 1996; Gutmann and Thompson 1996). Thomas Christiano has a good characterization of what pure proceduralism entails in an account of deliberative democracy: “democratic discussion, deliberation, and decisionmaking under certain conditions are what make the outcomes legitimate for each person. … [W]hatever the results of discussions, deliberation, and decisionmaking …, they are legitimate. The results are made legitimate by being the results of the procedure” (Christiano 1996: 35). 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 1996; Gaus 1997; Christiano 2008).

Estlund (2008) 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. They can argue that the legitimacy of democratically made decisions stems from the kind of political equality realized only by democracy. According to Christiano (2008), only in a democracy are people publicly treated as equals. According to Viehoff (2014) and Kolodny (2023), only a democracy secures the kind of relational equality that avoids subordinating some citizens to the decisions of others.

Another response to Estlund’s challenge against fairness-based arguments is to focus on the kind of freedom that democracy offers, rather than on egalitarian considerations. Pettit’s equal control view, already mentioned in sections 1 and 3.3, rests on this strategy. Pettit’s republican theory defends democracy as uniquely able to secure the non-domination of the citizens. Lafont (2019) defends the legitimacy of democracy on the basis of its link to self-governance (see the discussion of her view in section 4.1).

A different proceduralist response to Estlund’s challenge is to point to the procedural epistemic values that the democratic process realizes—on how inclusive it is, for example, or how thoroughly the knowledge claims on which particular proposals rest have been subjected to criticism. 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 2008).

Some conceptions of democratic legitimacy seek to reconcile instrumentalist and non-instrumentalist considerations. What we may call 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.

As is the case with pure proceduralist conceptions, rational proceduralist conceptions of democratic legitimacy also vary with the underlying account of democracy. A version of rational proceduralism is implicit in Arrow’s approach to aggregative democracy (Arrow 1963; see Peter 2008 for a discussion). 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. Arrow’s way of posing the problem—which contrasts with May’s (1952)—suggests that the possible irrationality of majority rule undermines its legitimacy, even if it respects certain procedural values. 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 version of rational proceduralism. Habermas’ conception of democratic legitimacy is an example. Drawing on discourse ethics, Habermas (1990; 1996) argues that people’s participation in the justificatory processes of deliberative democracy is necessary for political legitimacy. According to him, “the procedures and communicative presuppositions of democratic opinion- and will-formation function as the most important sluices for the discursive rationalization of the decisions of an administration bound by law and statute” (1996: 300). 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. As Habermas puts it: “Deliberative politics acquires its legitimating force from the discursive structure of an opinion- and will-formation that can fulfill its socially integrative function only because citizens expect its results to have a reasonable quality ” (Habermas 1996: 304; see also Benhabib 1994; Knight and Johnson 1994; Cohen 1997a,b; Bohman 1997). In his view, only deliberative democratic decision-making can produce a decision everyone has reasons to endorse.

Estlund objects to both pure proceduralist and the versions of rational proceduralism just discussed that they unduly neglect epistemic considerations. But he also objects to epistemic instrumentalist accounts that they 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. To correct for that, Estlund’s alternative conception of democratic legitimacy puts more emphasis on procedures while still giving weight to epistemic considerations. The conception of legitimacy that he advocates “requires that the procedure can be held, in terms acceptable to all qualified points of view, to be epistemically the best (or close to it) among those that are better than random” (Estlund 2008: 98). By privileging what he calls the “qualified acceptability requirement” (2008: 40ff) over epistemic considerations, Estlund avoids the worry about political deference that drives Lafont’s (2019) rejection of epistemic theories of democratic legitimacy.

As we saw, worries about political deference are an important source for scepticism about both epistocratic and epistemic democracy theories of legitimacy (see also van Wietmarschen 2019, Lillehammer 2021, and Brinkmann 2022 on political deference). Peter (2023), by contrast, argues that these principled worries about political deference are overstated and that legitimate political decision-making may be compatible with a requirement to politically defer, even in a system that is overall democratic.

5. Legitimacy and Political Cosmopolitanism

Political cosmopolitanism about political legitimacy 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? Call this 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.g., the rules of the WTO treaty) and global political agents (e.g., the UN General Assembly). This raises the question of what conditions such global governance institutions have to satisfy in order to qualify as legitimate. 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 (see Stilz 2019 and Sadurski, Sevel, and Walton 2019 for recent explorations of these issues).

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 1979a,b, 1998; Pogge 2008). 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 2008 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 2001; Nagel 2005). What these approaches to global justice have failed to address is the possibility of sound political cosmopolitan conceptions of political legitimacy. Nicole Hassoun (2012) 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 Michael Blake (2001) and Thomas Nagel (2005) on their heads, that securing the legitimacy of those institutions entails obligations of global justice. (See also Aytac 2022 on this, who approaches the issue from political realist perspective.)

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. As Charles Beitz characterizes this approach: “international society is understood as domestic society writ large, with states playing the roles occupied by persons in domestic society. States, not persons, are the subjects of international morality, and the rules that regulate their behavior are supposed to preserve a peaceful order of sovereign states” (1979b: 408; see also Beitz 1998). Locke, Bentham, and Mill, among others, approached the issue of international legitimacy in this way. Among contemporary thinkers, Michael Walzer (1977, 1980) 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. (For discussions of Walzer’s proposal, see Beitz 1979a, b). Others have put forward conceptions based on state consent. Rawls advocates a conception based on the consent of “well-ordered” (either “liberal” or “decent”) peoples (Rawls 1999; for critical discussions, see e.g., Buchanan 2000; Wenar 2002; Cavallero 2003).

The second approach takes features of individuals—their interests or their rights—as basic for legitimacy. At present, the most comprehensive contemporary philosophical treatment of international legitimacy of this kind is probably Allen Buchanan’s Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination (2003). As mentioned above (section 2.2.), Buchanan advocates a moralized conception of legitimacy, according to which entities are legitimate if they are morally justified to wield political power. 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. What he regards as the main problem of legitimacy at the international level is, instead, that “a technocratic elite, lacking in democratic accountability to individuals and nonstate groups, is playing an increasingly powerful role in a system of regional and global governance” (2003: 289). 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 2003: 266ff). The first is a “minimal internal justice requirement”. 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. The second criterion is thus a criterion of procedural justice and requires that a political entity has not come about through usurpation (“nonusurpation requirement”). Finally, there is a “minimal external justice requirement”. It contains conditions about how political entities should interact with one another.

Sofia Näsström (2007) uses the people-centered approach to push against the tendency to associate state legitimacy with the legitimacy of governments. 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.

The question Näsström articulates, which is also discussed in the literature on the constitution of the demos (Goodin 2007), is important for the debate on the ethics of immigration. 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? Abizadeh (2008) has argued, on the basis of the claim that the constitution of the demos is not a historical given, that a commitment to a democratic theory of domestic political legitimacy implies that one ought to reject the unilateral domestic right to control and close the state’s boundaries. 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 2008 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. Kant is often read as advocating a conception of international legitimacy based on a loose “league of nations”—especially in Perpetual Peace . But Sharon Byrd and Joachim Hruschka (2008) argue that Kant, especially in The Doctrine of Right , can also be read as favoring, a “state of nation states” as the right approach to global legitimacy. 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.g., Caney 2006; Valentini 2012).

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 2012). 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?

In response to the first question, Buchanan and Keohane (2006) argue that global governance institutions such as the WTO or the IMF “are like governments in that they issue rules and publicly attach significant consequences to compliance or failure to comply with them—and claim authority to do so” (Buchanan and Keohane 2006: 406). 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 (2005) have a slightly broader account of global governance institutions—one that is not limited to them being coordination devices, but that emphasizes coercion instead. According to Cohen and Sabel 2005: 765), “[t]o a substantial and growing extent … rulemaking directly affecting the freedom of action of individuals, firms, and nation states (and the making of rules to regulate this rulemaking) is taking place … in global settings created by the world’s nations but no longer under their effective control.” In their answer to the second question, they relate the legitimacy problem of global governance institutions to the absence of political authority, understood as legitimate exercises of coercive political power, at the global level. 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 2006: 408ff).

In answer to the third question, Buchanan and Keohane (2006) propose a moralized conception of legitimacy: legitimacy “is the right to rule, understood to mean both that institutional agents are morally justified in making rules and attempting to secure compliance with them and that people subject to those rules have moral, content-independent reasons to follow them and/or to not interfere with others’ compliance with them” (2006: 411). Substantively, they propose that an institution is morally justified in this way if it does not contribute to grave injustices (“minimal moral acceptability”), if there is no obvious alternative that would perform better (“comparative benefit”), and if it respects its own guidelines and procedures (“institutional integrity”) (Buchanan and Keohane 2006: 419ff).

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.g., Beitz 1979b, 1998; Held 1995, 2002; Buchanan 2003; Buchanan and Keohane 2006). 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 2014 for a discussion).

In response to the second worry, Christiano (2015) 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. Christiano’s work offers the most comprehensive defense of a human right to democracy at the domestic level (Christiano 2011; 2015). Christiano’s instrumental argument aims to show that democracies offer better protection of a range of human rights than non-democracies. His intrinsic argument for a human right to democracy builds on an argument discussed earlier (section 4.2), namely that democracies are uniquely able to realize the value of publicly treating people as equals.

Cohen and Sabel (2005) 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 2007; List and Koenig-Archibugi 2010).

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Arendt, Hannah | authority | coercion | democracy | feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy | Habermas, Jürgen | Hobbes, Thomas: moral and political philosophy | justification, political: public | Kant, Immanuel: social and political philosophy | legal obligation and authority | Locke, John: political philosophy | perfectionism, in moral and political philosophy | political obligation | public reason | Rawls, John | social contract: contemporary approaches to | sovereignty

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Thomas Pogge and Laura Valentini for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Copyright © 2023 by Fabienne Peter < f . peter @ warwick . ac . uk >

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2 Power, Legitimacy, and their Relationship

• Published: December 2013
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This chapter poses the book’s central research question: what power do operations have to obtain local cooperation? Drawing on a number of disciplinary approaches, it develops a framework of power and legitimacy to study how peace operations influence the behaviour of local actors. It defines the book’s focus on compulsory power and draws on political, jurisprudential, sociological, and psychological literatures to identify the sources of power available to a peace operation: coercion, inducement, and legitimacy. The local legitimacy of peace operations is conceptualized as a dynamic web of interacting strands that may exert legitimizing or delegitimizing influences. These strands constitute three types of legitimation: source-based legitimacy, which refers to the origins of a peace operation’s claim to authority; substantive legitimacy, the appropriateness of the operation’s outcomes; and procedural legitimacy, the fairness of a peace operation’s practices.

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Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — Political Culture — Power, Legitimacy & Authority: Key Concepts in Understanding Politics

Power, Legitimacy & Authority: Key Concepts in Understanding Politics

• Categories: Political Culture Political Participation

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Published: May 17, 2022

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Table of contents

Introduction, bibliography.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character give him power. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on 'Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned'? Get original essay - Abraham Lincoln

State of nature

Government formation, political issues, personal loyalty, my changing perspective.

• Beethnam, D., 2001. Political Legitmacy. pp. 107-116.
• Farell, L. O., 2019. Thomas Hobbs on the State on Nature , s.l.: s.n.
• Fieser, J. & Dowden, B., 1995. Internet enclyopedia of philophy; a Peer academic resorce. [Online]
• Available at: https://www.iep.utm.edu/
• [Accessed 2019 2019].
• Jacob Weisberg , 2008. Loyalty; It’s the most overrated virtue in politics.. [Online]
• Available at: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2008/11/loyalty-is-the-most-overrated-virtue-in-politics.html
• Miller, D., 2003. Political Philosophy; A short intorduction. oxford : oxford press .
• Politics, 2002. Andrew heywood. 2nd ed. New York : Palgrave Macmillan.
• Robinson, N., 2019. Justifying power: the legitimation of authority, s.l.: s.n.

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Power, Authority & Legitimacy Theory

• All politics is about power – achieving and maintaining it – Hobbes – basic human urge is to seek ‘power after power’. Programmed – Dawkins’ selfish gene. Conservative viewpoint.
• The ability to get someone to do something they otherwise wouldn’t do – ‘power to’.
• Distinguished with authority by power being the ability to do and authority right to do.
• Distinction from influence – ability to affect outcome even if not having actual final power to decide – influence is a minor form of power by affecting their actions without inciting force/fear – e.g. manipulation.
• Lukes sees power in three forms: decision-making, agenda setting and thought control.
• Decision-making – associated with liberal and pluralist perceptions focussing on who actually makes the decisions. Boulding argues decision-making influenced in three ways: the stick (coercion), the deal (mutual benefit through negotiation), and the kiss (sense of loyalty and commitment to individual, thus he has power).
• Dahl observed decision-making ‘Critique of the ruling elite model’ and found no single elite in charge, pluralist approach, everyone has a say. Different groups have a say on different aspects. Reality was an “example of a democratic system warts and all”.
• Elitist critiques argue this fails to understand unequal influence of key elites – real decisions made by a fixed elite – real power belongs to banks and military C.Wright Mills .
• Hobbes – physical or mechanical power whereby power  is used against an individual’s will – individual is subservient to it, otherwise life would be nasty, brutish and short. Advocates strong, monarchical government.
• Agenda setting – Bachrach Baratz –idea of non-decision making. Schattschneider “some issues are organised into politics and others are organised out”.
• Links to influential parties who collectively agree or just block discussion – slight elitist theory.
• B and B and ‘mobilisation of bias’ yet individuals and pressure groups can change agendas, yet more likely to do so on issues represented by well informed and articulate. Elite tend to dominate flow of information and media and so use this to their advantage. Look at the way demonstrations are portrayed in the media.
• Marxists would argue agenda setting is a facade for bourgeois dominance with parliamentary systems of government being “the executive committee of the bourgeoisie” (Marx).
• Thought control – previous two assume that people and groups are rational and capable of knowing their own mind. The ability to manipulate human behaviour can be shaped – some argue this is where the real power lies.
• Marxist ideas based on favouritism of state towards bourgeoisie and their power through economy and politics – Gramsci and bourgeois hegemony – bourgeoisie literally control popular culture and so control the way we think. Therefore we think life is only better with material goods so bourgeoisie benefit even more.
• Vance Packard – consumer based society and only think we’re happy when we have material goods.
• New Left ideas and Marcuse – link to totalitarianism but with media, TUs, adverts, culture replacing brutal coercion manipulating needs.
• Difference between ‘real’ and ‘felt’ interests – Engels and false consciousness. Don’t know what is in our real interest – no longer rational.
• Liberals reject this – individuals are rational.
• Generally distinguished from power through the means by which compliance and obedience are achieved – Heywood “authority is power cloaked in legitimacy”. Authority a form of rightful power.
• Authority based on a perceived ‘right to rule’ ( Weber ) with a moral aspect.
• Weber linked authority to legitimacy – different approach from others stating that legitimacy gave power authority.
• Weber – authority is important irrespective of how it’s achieved. As long as there is the perception that authority is legitimate it’s fine.
• Authority seldom exercised in absence of power.
• Weber – traditional (respect for elders), charismatic (value opinions and words through their responsibility), legal-rational (respect for right of state – parliament’s legal rights to pass new laws).
• Traditional – sanctified by history and based upon ‘immemorial custom’. Hierarchy – Burke – ‘wisdom of the ancients’. Patriarchalism – links to hereditary systems. Less relevant today, although evident in one form in theocratic states – the resurgence of this type of authority can be seen as a response to the failure of other types in degenerative Western capitalism.
• Charismatic – based entirely upon the power of an individual’s personality. Owes nothing to status, social position or office, yet can be used to promote the interests of society ( Rousseau and Law Giver).
• Charismatic has an almost messianic quality – treated with suspicion – Talmon and criticism of Rousseau.
• Legal-rational – situation for most liberal democratic Western capitalist societies. Operates through a body of clearly defined rules – linked to formal powers of office not office holder. Less likely to be abused than other 2 as the limit of authority is defined.
• Arises out of a respect for the rule of law and is evident in the constitutional framework of long-established states. Can be seen as de-personalising as there can be a relentless spread of bureaucracy e.g. civil service.
• De jure authority – authority in law. Authority from an office. Operates according to a set of rules. Closely linked to traditional/legal-rational. Related to being IN authority.
• De facto – authority in practice. Closely linked to charismatic. Authority by virtue of who they are – being AN authority.

Relationship between power and authority

• Authority is the legitimate exercise of power but debate as to whether this requires morality or PERCEPTION or rightfulness.
• Ruling by power alone eventually lead to unsustainable use of coercive resources – Mao – “all power stems from the barrel of a gun” and is the antithesis of authority.
• Can authority exist without power? Weberian sense of traditional and charismatic forms all exert influence without the need to persuade. Legal-rational based on office and power invested in the office thus need power. Also being ‘an authority’ doesn’t  need recourse to power but can have influence.

Different views of authority

• Liberals – authority instrumental, coming from below through the consent of the governed – social contract.
• Do not want too much state involvement therefore authority is limited, rational and purposeful leading to preference for legal-rational.
• Conservatives – comes from above from those with experience and wisdom. Benefits other but there are few limits leading to authoritarianism through charismatic.
• Authority – justified? Essential for maintenance of order. Enemy of freedom – Libertarian/Anarchist view. Marxists – authority manufactured to mask rule by the bourgeoisie. Expectation to give unquestioning obedience is wrong as it threatens reason – Mill – intellectual diversity.
• To be in a position to exercise authority. Links to power and authority by transforming the former into the latter – turns naked power into authority.
• Moral right to rule – Locke and consent – social contrast theory – we consent to be governed. If there is a formal constitutional basis, we can see legitimacy.
• Hobbes – social contract – dictatorship could have legitimacy as it is meant to protect the individual – the Leviathan state – legitimacy comes about by preventing people getting harmed – implied consent.
• For Rousseau the state is legitimate if it upholds the general will.
• Likes of Weber see a belief in legitimacy as important no matter how it is achieved.

How do governments gain and maintain legitimacy?

• Social contract – tacit and formal agreement whereby state’s legitimacy is based on protection of citizens ( Hobbes ) and promotion of rights and freedoms ( Locke ) and the common good ( Rousseau ).
• Locke challenged Hobbes as he believed a man could not give away more power over himself than he himself has. Tacit consent is given to the government by anyone who has “possession or enjoyment of any part of the dominions of any government”.
• Popular compliance – populace have a belief in the right to rule which in a democracy is based around the exercise of legal-rational authority.
• Constitutionalism – Beetham – legitimacy operating under existing established principles thus power exercised through the existing constitutional process if this adheres to the widely held beliefs and values of a society.
• 1. Power exercised according to certain rules.
• 2. Rules justified in terms of ruler and ruled – marrying the shared belief between government and people (communitarianism).
• 3. People must give consent – how much consent must people give to give something legitimacy?
• Active consent – seen through ballot box with a mandate given to exercise legitimacy – elections/referendums and strengthened by universal suffrage – Mill .
• Legitimation crisis – neo-Marxist Habermas – legitimacy of a political system could collapsed because of the pressures created by democracy and capitalism. Democracy – voting becomes a means of consumerism. Capitalism – increased desire leads to recession – can’t continually provide what people want – e.g. extensive welfare provision. Legitimation crisis created after government intervention and conflict of free-market.
• Social contract – Giddens – communitarianism – Etzioni – taking social contract and trying to improve civic engagement through modern political systems.
• Ideological Hegemony – Conventional image of liberal democracies is that they enjoy legitimacy because they respect individual liberty and are responsive to public opinion. Critics – democracy is little more than a facade concealing the domination of a “power elite”.
• Ralph Milliband – liberal democracy is “capitalist democracy” – there are biases which serve interests of private property and ensure the long term stability of capitalism.
• Marxists state that bourgeois ideology denotes sets of ideas which conceal the contradictions upon which class societies are based – ideology propagates falsehood, delusion and mystification. Ideology operates in interests of the ruling class.
• Modern Marxists – political competition does exist but this competition is unequal. Gramsci drew attention to the degree to which the class system was upheld not simply by unequal power but also what he called bourgeois hegemony. 

Legitimacy in a dictatorship

• Weber argues that traditional and charismatic authority can be legitimate if accepted by populace. Marx argued that a dictatorship of the proletariat would be legitimate as it was acting in the best interests of the masses; likewise dictators claim to uphold common good without popular approval.  Traditional monarchs also claimed to be adhering to divine right as the best form of determining the common good.

17.1 Power and Authority

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

• Define and differentiate between power and authority
• Identify and describe the three types of authority

The world has almost 200 countries. Many of those countries have states or provinces with their own governments. In some countries such as the United States and Canada, Native Americans and First Nations have their own systems of government in some relationship with the federal government. Just considering those thousands of different entities, it's easy to see what differentiates governments. What about what they have in common? Do all of them serve the people? Protect the people? Increase prosperity?

The answer to those questions might be a matter of opinion, perspective, and circumstance. However, one reality seems clear: Something all governments have in common is that they exert control over the people they govern. The nature of that control—what we will define as power and authority—is an important feature of society.

Sociologists have a distinctive approach to studying governmental power and authority that differs from the perspective of political scientists. For the most part, political scientists focus on studying how power is distributed in different types of political systems. They would observe, for example, that the United States’ political system is divided into three distinct branches (legislative, executive, and judicial), and they would explore how public opinion affects political parties, elections, and the political process in general. Sociologists, however, tend to be more interested in the influences of governmental power on society and in how social conflicts arise from the distribution of power. Sociologists also examine how the use of power affects local, state, national, and global agendas, which in turn affect people differently based on status, class, and socioeconomic standing.

What Is Power?

For centuries, philosophers, politicians, and social scientists have explored and commented on the nature of power. Pittacus (c. 640–568 B.C.E.) opined, “The measure of a man is what he does with power,” and Lord Acton perhaps more famously asserted, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely” (1887). Indeed, the concept of power can have decidedly negative connotations, and the term itself is difficult to define.

Many scholars adopt the definition developed by German sociologist Max Weber, who said that power is the ability to exercise one’s will over others (Weber 1922). Power affects more than personal relationships; it shapes larger dynamics like social groups, professional organizations, and governments. Similarly, a government’s power is not necessarily limited to control of its own citizens. A dominant nation, for instance, will often use its clout to influence or support other governments or to seize control of other nation states. Efforts by the U.S. government to wield power in other countries have included joining with other nations to form the Allied forces during World War II, entering Iraq in 2002 to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime, and imposing sanctions on the government of North Korea in the hopes of constraining its development of nuclear weapons.

Endeavors to gain power and influence do not necessarily lead to violence, exploitation, or abuse. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi, for example, commanded powerful movements that effected positive change without military force. Both men organized nonviolent protests to combat corruption and injustice and succeeded in inspiring major reform. They relied on a variety of nonviolent protest strategies, such as rallies, sit-ins, marches, petitions, and boycotts.

Modern technology has made such forms of nonviolent reform easier to implement. Often, protesters can use cell phones and the Internet to disseminate information and plans to masses of protesters in a rapid and efficient manner. Some governments like Myanmar, China, and Russia tamp down communication and protest through platform bans or Internet blocks (see the Media and Technology chapter for more information). But in the Arab Spring uprisings of 2010-11, for example, Twitter feeds and other social media helped protesters coordinate their movements, share ideas, and bolster morale, as well as gain global support for their causes. Social media was also important in getting accurate accounts of the demonstrations out to the world, in contrast to many earlier situations in which government control of the media censored news reports. Notice that in these examples, the users of power were the citizens rather than the governments. They found they had power because they were able to exercise their will over their own leaders. Thus, government power does not necessarily equate to absolute power.

Big Picture

Social media as a terrorist tool.

British aid worker, Alan Henning, was the fourth victim of the Islamic State (known as ISIS or ISIL) to be beheaded before video cameras in a recording titled, “Another Message to America and Its Allies,” which was posted on YouTube and pro-Islamic state Twitter feeds in the fall of 2014. Henning was captured during his participation in a convoy taking medical supplies to a hospital in conflict-ravaged northern Syria. His death was publicized via social media, as were the earlier beheadings of U.S. journalists Jim Foley and Steven Sotloff and British aid worker David Haines. The terrorist groups also used social media to demand an end to intervention in the Middle East by U.S., British, French, and Arab forces.

An international coalition, led by the United States, has been formed to combat ISIS in response to this series of publicized murders. France and the United Kingdom, members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and Belgium are seeking government approval through their respective parliaments to participate in airstrikes. The specifics of target locations are a key point, however, and they emphasize the delicate and political nature of current conflict in the region. Due to perceived national interest and geopolitical dynamics, Britain and France are more willing to be a part of airstrikes on ISIS targets in Iran and likely to avoid striking targets in Syria. Several Arab nations are a part of the coalition, including Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Turkey, another NATO member, has not announced involvement in airstrikes, presumably because ISIS is holding forty-nine Turkish citizens hostage.

U.S. intervention in Libya and Syria is controversial, and it arouses debate about the role of the United States in world affairs, as well as the practical need for, and outcome of, military action in the Middle East. Experts and the U.S. public alike are weighing the need for fighting terrorism in its current form of the Islamic State and the bigger issue of helping to restore peace in the Middle East. Some consider ISIS a direct and growing threat to the United States if left unchecked. Others believe U.S. intervention unnecessarily worsens the Middle East situation and prefer that resources be used at home rather than increasing military involvement in an area of the world where they believe the United States has intervened long enough.

Types of Authority

The protesters in Tunisia and the civil rights protesters of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s day had influence apart from their position in a government. Their influence came, in part, from their ability to advocate for what many people held as important values. Government leaders might have this kind of influence as well, but they also have the advantage of wielding power associated with their position in the government. As this example indicates, there is more than one type of authority in a community.

Authority refers to accepted power—that is, power that people agree to follow. People listen to authority figures because they feel that these individuals are worthy of respect. Generally speaking, people perceive the objectives and demands of an authority figure as reasonable and beneficial, or true.

Not all authority figures are police officers, elected officials or government authorities. Besides formal offices, authority can arise from tradition and personal qualities. Economist and sociologist Max Weber realized this when he examined individual action as it relates to authority, as well as large-scale structures of authority and how they relate to a society’s economy. Based on this work, Weber developed a classification system for authority. His three types of authority are traditional authority, charismatic authority and legal-rational authority (Weber 1922).

Traditional Authority

According to Weber, the power of traditional authority is accepted because that has traditionally been the case; its legitimacy exists because it has been accepted for a long time. Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, for instance, occupies a position that she inherited based on the traditional rules of succession for the monarchy. People adhere to traditional authority because they are invested in the past and feel obligated to perpetuate it. In this type of authority, a ruler typically has no real force to carry out his will or maintain his position but depends primarily on a group’s respect.

A more modern form of traditional authority is patrimonialism , which is traditional domination facilitated by an administration and military that are purely personal instruments of the master (Eisenberg 1998). In this form of authority, all officials are personal favorites appointed by the ruler. These officials have no rights, and their privileges can be increased or withdrawn based on the caprices of the leader. The political organization of ancient Egypt typified such a system: when the royal household decreed that a pyramid be built, every Egyptian was forced to work toward its construction.

Traditional authority can be intertwined with race, class, and gender. In most societies, for instance, men are more likely to be privileged than women and thus are more likely to hold roles of authority. Similarly, members of dominant racial groups or upper-class families also win respect more readily. In the United States, the Kennedy family, which has produced many prominent politicians, exemplifies this model.

Charismatic Authority

Followers accept the power of charismatic authority because they are drawn to the leader’s personal qualities. The appeal of a charismatic leader can be extraordinary, and can inspire followers to make unusual sacrifices or to persevere in the midst of great hardship and persecution. Charismatic leaders usually emerge in times of crisis and offer innovative or radical solutions. They may even offer a vision of a new world order. Hitler’s rise to power in the postwar economic depression of Germany is an example.

Charismatic leaders tend to hold power for short durations, and according to Weber, they are just as likely to be tyrannical as they are heroic. Diverse male leaders such as Hitler, Napoleon, Jesus Christ, César Chávez, Malcolm X, and Winston Churchill are all considered charismatic leaders. Because so few women have held dynamic positions of leadership throughout history, the list of charismatic female leaders is comparatively short. Many historians consider figures such as Joan of Arc, Margaret Thatcher, and Mother Teresa to be charismatic leaders.

Rational-Legal Authority

According to Weber, power made legitimate by laws, written rules, and regulations is termed rational-legal authority . In this type of authority, power is vested in a particular rationale, system, or ideology and not necessarily in the person who implements the specifics of that doctrine. A nation that follows a constitution applies this type of authority. On a smaller scale, you might encounter rational-legal authority in the workplace via the standards set forth in the employee handbook, which provides a different type of authority than that of your boss.

Of course, ideals are seldom replicated in the real world. Few governments or leaders can be neatly categorized. Some leaders, like Mohandas Gandhi for instance, can be considered charismatic and legal-rational authority figures. Similarly, a leader or government can start out exemplifying one type of authority and gradually evolve or change into another type.

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Power And Authority: The Structures of Governance 

Power and authority are integral to political systems and vital in shaping governance structures and societal dynamics.

Understanding the complex interplay between power and control is crucial for comprehending how political systems function and their impact on individuals and communities.

This article will explore the intricate realm of power and authority, exploring their definitions, importance, and how they shape governance structures.

By utilizing the capabilities of a thesis generator , we will uncover unique perspectives and valuable insights to shed light on the dynamics of power and authority in politics.

Table of Contents

Defining Power and Authority: Key Concepts in Political Governance

Power is the capacity to exert influence or control over others. It can appear in various ways, including physical strength, wealth, information, or persuasive abilities.

On the other hand, the term “authority” refers to the legitimate right to use force. It is drawn from the approval and permission of the governed. Authority giving power a recognized and approved status offers a framework for using the power within established norms and regulations.

Must Read Guide – 9 Key Differences Between Power and Authority

Traditional Authority: The Impact of Customary Practices on Power Structures

Traditions, beliefs, and long-standing practices are the foundation of traditional authority. It is frequently linked to tribal or hereditary monarchs where authority is passed down through the generations.

The perception of the traditions and conventions upon which traditional management is based determines its legitimacy. However, conventional authority may confront difficulties when civilizations change, and new power structures form in contemporary society.

Legal-Rational Authority: Power Embedded in Institutional Frameworks

Legal-rational authority is based on formal rules and institutional frameworks. It is typically found in democratic societies, where power is derived from positions within established institutions and organizations.

This authority is grounded in the rule of law and adherence to constitutional processes. The legal-rational authority provides a system of checks and balances that ensure the exercise of power remains within defined boundaries and is subject to accountability.

Charismatic Authority: Exploring the Influence of Personal Qualities in Leadership

Charismatic authority arises from the personal qualities and charisma of an individual leader. Charismatic leaders can inspire and mobilize others through their unique qualities, vision, or persuasive abilities.

This type of authority often emerges during times of crisis or social upheaval, as charismatic leaders can rally support and drive significant change. However, charismatic authority can also be volatile, as it heavily relies on the personality and influence of the leader.

Power and Decision-Making: Understanding the Complex Interplay

Power impacts decision-making processes within political frameworks. Those in influential positions shape policies, allocate resources, and set plans.

The dispersion of power within a society or establishment determines who has a say in decision-making and whose interests are prioritized. Nonetheless, the direction isn’t exclusively directed by power dynamics. Different elements, like general assessment, institutional systems, and balanced governance, additionally play vital roles.

The Role of Institutions: Navigating Power and Authority in Governance

Institutions are fundamental structures within political systems that exercise power and authority. These can include branches of government, legislative bodies, judicial systems, and bureaucratic organizations.

Institutions serve as mechanisms to distribute, balance, and check the exercise of power. They provide frameworks for decision-making, policy implementation, and accountability. Well-functioning institutions are essential for maintaining stability and upholding the principles of governance.

Must Read Guide- Governance: Meaning, Definition, 4 Dimensions, And Types

Social Developments and Power: Catalysts for Transforming Political Structures

Social developments are fundamental in testing existing power structures and supporting change. These developments frequently emerge from societal discontent with the state of affairs and try to address social, monetary, or political disparities.

By assembling aggregate activity and bringing issues to light, social developments can apply strain on people with significant influence, shaping policies and agendas. They can be powerful catalysts for societal transformation.

Must Read Guide- Good Governance: Definitions, 8 Characteristics, And Importance

Democracy: Power and Authority through the Consent of the Governed

Democracy is a system of governance that emphasizes the participation and consent of the governed. In democratic societies, power and authority derive from the people’s will, who elect representatives to make decisions on their behalf.

Democratic systems aim to distribute power and provide mechanisms for accountability, transparency, and the protection of individual rights. Democracy seeks to ensure that power is exercised with the consent and for the benefit of the governed.

Implications of Power and Authority: Shaping Political Systems and Society

The distribution and exercise of power and authority have profound implications for political systems and society. Power imbalances can lead to social, economic, and political inequalities, affecting the lives of individuals and communities.

The consolidation of power in the hands of a few can hinder progress, stifle dissent, and perpetuate injustice. Understanding these implications is crucial for designing governance systems that promote fairness, equality, and societal well-being.

Building Legitimacy and Trust: The Significance of Consent in Governance

Legitimacy and trust are vital elements for effective governance. Legitimate power and authority are built upon the consent and acceptance of the people.

When individuals perceive those in power as fair, they are more likely to comply with laws, participate in decision-making processes, and support governance efforts. Building trust requires transparency, accountability, and responsiveness to the needs and aspirations of the people.

Preventing Abuse of Power: Safeguards, Transparency, and Accountability

Power can result in corruption, repression, and the infringement of human rights. Putting in place safeguards, fostering transparency, and ensuring the enforcement of accountability mechanisms are fundamental to preventing such abuses.

These measures encompass impartial judicial systems, vigorous oversight organizations, whistleblower protections, and a free press. By guaranteeing transparency and holding individuals in positions of influence responsible, societies can mitigate the risks associated with the misuse of power.

Power, Authority, and Social Change: Advancing Equality and Progress

Social developments can shape political frameworks and cultivate progress by challenging harsh frameworks and upholding minimized gatherings. The interplay between power, authority, and social change is intricate and requires progressing exchange, coordinated effort, and commitment to advance equality and societal prosperity.

Power elements altogether influence social change. Social developments, driven by a craving for equality, equity, and human rights, challenge existing power structures and promote transformative change.

Power and authority are fundamental parts of political governance. Grasping their definitions, dynamics, and suggestions is significant for comprehending the structures and working of governance frameworks.

The interaction between conventional authority, legitimate, reasonable authority, and charismatic authority shapes emotional cycles, the job of establishments, and the potential for social change.

Building authentic, responsible, and comprehensive frameworks guarantees that power is practiced capably and in the best interest of society. Social orders can advance trust, support, and progress by taking a stab at evenhanded and straightforward governance.

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Power, Authourity and Legitimacy; the similarities and Disperities

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Adrian Leftwich argues basically for the centrality and primacy of politics, and of political processes, in shaping state goals, capacity, and developmental outcomes.He believes that surmounting developmental obstacles is basically a matter of politics. The main aim of politics for him is to “identify, nurture, encourage and support those social and political forces which are necessary for forming the kind of growth coalition which will demand, design and implement the institutional arrangements which will deliver pro-poor growth and social provision” (Leftwich: 2008: 3). In this way, development becomes quintessentially political according to Leftwich. This kind of politics is healthy and can propel development in Ghana. But what is the greatest threat to this sort of politics? This research answers that it is patrimonialism. Weber defined patrimonialism as a pre-bureaucratic type of domination “based not on the official’s commitment to an impersonal purpose and not on obedience to abstract norms, but on a strictly personal loyalty” (Weber: 1978: 1006). The basic argument in this research is that, patrimonialism is a very poor socio-political arrangement which woefully fails to infuse in the citizenry the genuine sense of solidarity, and awaken in them the gene that makes them want to better their collective lots. It inspires the worst motive for service (appropriation of office), and blurs the vision of servants as regards the boundaries of the “private” and the “official, public, or res publica.” It over-concentrates power in one area of government, arrests the system of any meaningful attempt at development by channelling all state resources (public and private, technical and manual, capital and human resources) towards the consolidation of the rulers’ power and their betterment or personal aggrandisement. There cannot be any social ill worse than this; a social nightmare from which all men and women need to awake.

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13.2: Contemporary Government Regimes- Power, Legitimacy, and Authority

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Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe the nature of governing regimes.
• Define power, authority, and legitimacy.
• Explain the relationships among power, authority, and legitimacy.
• Discuss political history and contemporary political and legal developments surrounding governing regimes.

A government can be defined as a set of organizations, with their associated rules and procedures, that has the authority to exercise the widest scope of power —the ability to impose its will on others to secure desired outcomes—over a defined area. Government authority includes the power to have the final say over when the use of force is acceptable, and governments seek to exercise their authority with legitimacy. This is a complex definition, so this section unpacks its elements one by one.

A government both claims the right and has the ability to exercise power over all people in a defined geographic area. The leadership of a church or a mosque, for example, can refuse to offer religious services to certain individuals or can excommunicate them. However, such organizations have no right to apply force to impose their will on non-congregants. In contrast, governments reserve for themselves the broadest scope of rightful power within their area of control and can, in principle, impose their will on vast areas of the lives of all people within the territories over which they rule. During the COVID-19 pandemic, only governments both claimed and exercised the right to close businesses and to forbid religious institutions to hold services. The pandemic also highlights another feature of governments: almost all governments seek to have and to exercise power in order to create at least minimal levels of peace, order, and collective stability and safety.

As German social scientist Max Weber maintained, almost all governments seek to have and to enforce the right to have the final say over when violence is acceptable within their territory. Governments often assert what Weber called a monopoly on the right to use violence , reserving for themselves either the right to use violence or the right to approve its use by others. 1 The word monopoly might be misleading. In most countries, citizens have a right to use violence in self-defense; most governments do not maintain that they alone can exercise the acceptable use of violence. Where the government recognizes the right to use violence in self-defense, it will seek to reserve for itself the right to decide when, in its judgment, that use is acceptable.

Imagine a landlord confronting a tenant who has not paid their rent. The landlord cannot violently seize the renter and forcibly evict them from the apartment; only the police—an agency of the state—can acceptably do that. Nevertheless, the law of many countries recognizes a right of self-defense by means of physical violence. In many US states, for example, if a person enters your house unlawfully with a weapon and you suspect they constitute a threat to you or your family, you have a broad right to use force against that intruder in self-defense (a principle that forms the core of the “ castle doctrine ”). In addition, private security guards can sometimes use force to protect private property. The government retains the right to determine, via its court system, whether these uses of force meet the criteria for being judged acceptable. Because the government sets these criteria, it can be said to have the final say on when the use of force is permissible.

Authority is the permission, conferred by the laws of a governing regime, to exercise power. Governments most often seek to authorize their power in the form of some decree or set of decrees—most often in the form of a legal constitution that sets out the scope of the government’s powers and the process by which laws will be made and enforced. The enactment of codes of criminal law, the creation of police forces, and the establishment of procedures surrounding criminal justice are clear examples of the development of authorized power. To some degree, the constitution of every government authorizes the government to impose a prohibition, applicable in principle to all people in its territory, on certain behaviors. Individuals engaging in those behaviors are subject to coercive enforcement by the state’s police force, which adheres to defined lines of authority and the rules police departments must follow.

Governmental regulations are another type of authorized government power. The laws that structure a regime usually give the government the authority to regulate individual and group behaviors. For example, Article 1 Section 8 of the US Constitution authorizes the federal government to regulate interstate commerce. When large commercial airlines fly individuals across state lines for a fee, they engage in interstate commerce. The federal government therefore has the authority to regulate airline safety requirements and flight patterns. Pursuant to this authority, the federal government has established an agency, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), to issue these regulations, which are ultimately backed by the state’s coercive enforcement power.

Weber argued that those who structure regimes are likely to choose, on the basis of the regime’s own best interests, to create authority that is clearly spelled out in a regime’s constitutional law. 2 When lines of authority in the government are clear, especially in the context of the state’s criminal law, the people living in a regime are less fearful of the state. This helps the state secure the people’s support. When the scope of the government’s authority is clear, people can understand how their government is structured and functions and are therefore less likely to be surprised by governmental actions. This can be especially important for the economy. To follow the example above, if laws regulating the private ownership of commercial airlines are constantly open to unexpected change, some people may be wary of working in the industry or investing their money in these companies’ stock. Predictable governmental action can encourage these investments. With increased economic activity, the government can tax the productive output, amassing resources to help it achieve whatever its goals might be. In addition, clearly defined structures of authority in the form of stable bureaucratic institutions allow a government to exercise power more efficiently and cost-effectively, once again enabling it to amass more resources to serve its objectives. 3

The use of physical force to directly restrain behavior is just one of the ways governments exercise power. Governments also tax. In a sense, the taxing authority of government is a necessary corollary of its authority to impose behavior-restricting rules: almost all governments must derive revenue through taxes in order to finance the maintenance of their laws and to ensure peace and public order. However, that authority also allows governments to exercise power to achieve a wide variety of ends, funding everything from foreign wars to a social safety net or a set of social programs. Taxation is another way governments regulate people’s behavior: if you don’t pay your taxes, the government is authorized to punish you—a principle true across the world, even if the levels of enforcement for not paying taxes vary across regimes.

The authority to tax illustrates another aspect of governmental power: the use of authority to shape society by creating incentives for particular kinds of behavior. In the United States, the federal tax code enables taxpayers to deduct large charitable donations from their taxable income as a way to encourage individuals to give to charities. Additionally, homeowners can deduct the interest they pay on their home mortgage, thereby reducing their annual federal tax obligation. This use of government power is meant to encourage people to own homes rather than rent. In the United States, at least, the federal government has encouraged homeownership due to a belief that homeownership helps people build closer ties with and involvement in local communities and thus increases civic participation, and that owning a home correlates with greater levels of long-term savings, which can provide individuals greater financial security in their retirement. 4 (For some people, their house is their largest asset, which can help to finance their retirement.) Conversely, governments can impose “sin taxes”—that is, taxes on products like alcohol and cigarettes, discouraging their use. Some lawmakers have proposed levying higher taxes on bullets to discourage gun violence, and some areas have taxed sugary soft drinks to discourage their consumption as a way to improve public health. 5

Show Me the Data

Beyond taxation, governmental leaders can use their office to influence public opinion. Governmental authorities are often authorized to use the government’s assets to promote their policies: the president of the United States, for example, is authorized to use Air Force One (the presidential jet) to travel the country in order to promote policy proposals. (Presidents are not, however, allowed to use Air Force One for free to conduct political fundraising.) Additionally, members of the United States Congress are authorized to send letters to constituents, free of charge, describing or defending the policies they support. Tools like these allow governments to exercise the power of influence and persuasion. The chief executive is usually the governmental official who takes the greatest advantage of this form of power. In the United States, presidents such as Teddy Roosevelt became famous for skillfully using the “ bully pulpit ,” that is, the power of the president to shape the opinions of the population and, through this, potentially to influence members of other branches of the government, especially elected legislators.

Presidents and prime ministers often give speeches or issue proclamations to exert this power. President Barack Obama, for example, following a long tradition in American politics, spoke often of what “we as Americans” value as a way to persuade the populace to support the policy agenda of his administration. Take the following example from one of Obama’s speeches. In the speech, he defended his administration’s decision to change the priorities of federal immigration officials to less rigorously enforce laws requiring the deportation of undocumented individuals when those individuals entered the country as children—the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. Arguing that children brought to the country by their parents should not have to live in fear of deportation, Obama remarked:

“My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too. And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal—that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.” (emphasis added) 6

By using rhetoric that attempts to define the national ethos, governments can seek to exercise power by shaping the population’s sense of itself and its place in history.

Most governments establish authority not only to exercise power, but also in the pursuit of legitimacy. Legitimacy can be seen from two different vantage points. Following Weber, the term is often used to mean the widespread belief that the government has the right to exercise its power. In this sense—which can be called broad legitimacy —the concept describes a government trait. Legitimacy can also be seen from the perspective of individuals or groups who make determinations about whether their government is or is not legitimate—that is, rightfully exercising power, or what can be called judgments about legitimacy . In either sense, legitimacy is measured in perceptions of the rightfulness of government actions—the sense that those actions are morally appropriate and consistent with basic justice and social welfare.

It is quite possible for a small group or a small set of groups to conclude that their government is illegitimate and so does not have the right to exercise authorized power even as the vast majority think that government is rightfully exercising authorized power. In this case, since the dissenting group is small and the great majority see their government as legitimate, the state can be deemed broadly legitimate. Broad legitimacy, therefore, is defined not as unanimous agreement by the people that a government’s authority is rightfully exercised, but simply as a broad sentiment that it is.

Finding Legitimacy: What Does Legitimacy Mean to You?

In this Center for Public Impact video, people from around the world talk about what government legitimacy means to them.

Legitimacy is a vague concept. Citizens’ judgments about legitimacy entail the often-difficult determinations of what is or is not rightful and thus consistent with morality, justice, and social welfare. Judging rightfulness can be a challenging task, as can the determination of whether a regime truly possesses broad legitimacy. Though you cannot always say for certain that a government truly has broad legitimacy, broad illegitimacy is often easy to detect. Indications of governments that do not have broad legitimacy can take many forms, including sustained protests, very low levels of trust in the regime as captured by polling data, and widespread calls for revising or abandoning the constitution.

The most effective governments, Weber argued, not only have laws that clearly authorize power but also have some substantial measure of broad legitimacy. Broadly legitimate governments can exercise power without the threat of popular rebellion, and the state can more readily rely on people to follow the law. These conditions can spare the government the cost of large standing police forces or militaries, and those resources in turn can be allocated in other areas. Unsurprisingly, most governments seek to legitimize their rule.

In the United States, many debates over rival understandings of law and public policy are not debates over legitimacy. For example, many groups in the United States disagree over certain tax policies; some want to increase taxes to pay for greater services, while others want to lower taxes to encourage economic growth. Yet those who oppose a particular tax law rarely refer to it as illegitimate since the law is recognized as coming from a process that has widespread popular support—that is, from the lawmaking process authorized in the US Constitution. Therefore, tax laws that many disfavor are usually not seen as illegitimate, but simply as unpopular or unwise and thus in need of change.

However, in the United States today, more and more debates surrounding law, public policy, and election results are expressed in terms of judgments of their legitimacy or illegitimacy. A true loss of legitimacy, either in the eyes of a small group or in the eyes of the broad populace, occurs only when a law is determined to be so wrong or harmful that it is not right for the government to enact it. In many cases in the United States today, allegations of illegitimacy contend not that a law or electoral result lacks legitimacy because the substance of the law or election outcome is so egregious that it is not a rightful thing for the government to do or to permit, but because they claim the US Constitution does not authorize the law or the process that resulted in a particular outcome.

Consider the 2020 election and debates involving the administration of President Joe Biden . Many supporters of Donald Trump hold that President Biden is an illegitimate president, 7 but they contend not so much that he is so unacceptable that his holding the office of president is inconsistent with morality, justice, and social welfare, but that the governmental officials in charge of running the 2020 presidential election process acted inappropriately or even, some contend, engaged in criminal ballot tampering. For these reasons, to them Biden’s current presidency is unrightful because they see the process by which he was elected as unauthorized. 8 Numerous post-election audits have found the allegations to be without merit. 9 In an April 2021 poll, about three-quarters of Republicans, a quarter of Democrats, and half of Independents indicated that they believe the 2020 election was affected by cheating. 10

These debates are complicated, and it is difficult to pinpoint the origin, rationale, and true motivation behind these judgments that the election results, for example, are illegitimate. What can be said is that there seem to be not only deeply rooted disagreements in the United States over what policies are best, but also deep disagreements about whether a variety of laws or governmental actions are in fact authorized by the Constitution—a development arising because of deepening disagreements among citizens about what the Constitution and the rules it contains actually mean.

Some public allegations that a law or electoral outcome is illegitimate in the sense that it is unauthorized may be mere covers for the genuine view that the laws or the electoral results are themselves unrightful, even if they were authorized. Those making such claims may not wish to be seen as protesting authorized governmental activity since to do so could make them appear lawless or even revolutionary.

The Legitimate Exercise of Power

In some cases, the constitutional law of a governing regime authorizes the suspension of established laws and regulations, allowing the government to act without defined limits on the scope of its authorized actions. A common way this can occur is in regimes that authorize the government to declare states of emergency that suspend the government’s adherence to the ordinary scope of authorized power.

There are strong reasons for states to resist invoking a condition of emergency. Clear lines of government authority, especially in the context of the state’s criminal law, tend to make people less fearful of the state, allowing the state more easily to call upon the people for support and thus enhancing the state’s legitimacy. Nevertheless, many regimes have the authority to declare emergencies—often in response to threats to public safety, such as terrorism—and to act in only vaguely specified ways during these periods.

45 Years Ago, a State of Emergency Was Declared in India

In 1975, during a time of social and political unrest, India’s national government declared a nationwide state of emergency, allowing the government to suspend civil liberties.

States generally see the establishment of public security as critical to their continued broad legitimacy: a state that cannot protect its people is likely to lose the widespread sentiment that it has the right to rule. Yet many states realize the potential negative consequences of unpredictable or unrestrained state action. For this reason, many regimes authorize the declaration of states of emergency , but only for limited periods of time. In France, for example, the president can declare a state of emergency for no more than 12 days, after which any extension must be approved by a majority vote of the legislature. 11 This power was enacted in response to terrorist attacks in 2015 and was renewed periodically until 2017. The state of emergency allowed, for example, certain otherwise unauthorized police procedures, such as searching for evidence without a warrant issued by a judge. 12 France’s law authorizing emergency declarations dates to the 1950s, and that it is fully authorized by the French Constitution and widely approved 13 illustrates that in some circumstances governing regimes can legitimately exercise sweeping and unstructured governmental powers. 14

Where there is broad public support, regimes may periodically and legitimately reauthorize states of emergency. Take, for example, the State of Israel. Israeli law authorizes two different forms of declarations of emergency, one that can be issued only by the legislature and one that can be issued by the government’s executive officials without the need for the legislature’s approval. The first form, which allows the government “to alter any law temporarily,” 15 can remain in effect for up to one year and can be renewed indefinitely. This allows governmental officials to use sweeping powers restricted only by the vague statement that emergency enactments may not “allow infringement upon human dignity.” 16 In addition, The Basic Laws of Israel allow the Israeli government—independent of a declaration of emergency by the legislature—to declare a condition of emergency. 17 These decrees can remain in effect for three months but can also be renewed indefinitely. 18 Pursuant to this authority, the government in 1948 issued an Emergency Defense Regulation that authorized the “establishing [of] military tribunals to try civilians without granting the right of appeal, allowing sweeping searches and seizures, prohibiting publication of books and newspapers, demolishing houses, detaining individuals administratively for an indefinite period, sealing off particular territories, and imposing curfew.” 19 This regulation has been renewed every year since 1948; today it applies mostly to the West Bank. 20 Both forms of emergency decrees have broad support in Israel, 21 indicating the popular sentiment that the Israeli government has the right to invoke such sweeping and unrestricted protocols because of the widely held belief among Israelis that the country faces serious and ongoing threats.

Even when such declarations are authorized and have initial broad support, the extensive use of emergency decrees risks undermining the regime’s legitimacy. In the early 1970s, then-president of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos tested the limits of using emergency declarations to claim sweeping powers. In General Order No. 1, issued on September 22, 1972, Marcos declared:

“I, Ferdinand E. Marcos, President of the Philippines, by virtue of the powers vested in me by the Constitution as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, do hereby proclaim that I shall govern the nation and direct the operation of the entire Government, including all its agencies and instrumentalities.” 22

As one scholar relates, Marcos “took great pains to ensure that his actions would align with the dictates of the law.” 23 The Philippine Constitution at the time allowed the president, in his role as Commander in Chief, to declare an emergency and to use emergency powers. 24 To ensure he could remain in office beyond the two four-year terms allotted to each president by the constitution, Marcos called for a constitutional convention, which was ratified by the population and which changed the position of president into that of a prime minister who could serve as long as the parliament approved. After an additional constitutional change in 1981 that made the office of president once again directly elected by voters, Marcos successfully ran for president, pledging to continue to exercise sweeping unrestricted powers. 25 Marcos has thus been called a “constitutional dictator,” 26 one who came to rule with unrestrained power through a popular constitution and as a leader who himself enjoyed wide popularity.

Martial Law in the Philippines

In 1972, the president of the Phillippines, Ferdinand Marcos, declared martial law. This video clip describes what led up to the proclamation and the extreme conditions in place in the Phillippines under martial law.

At least, that is, at first. Over time, Marcos’s support deteriorated as people tired of his often chaotic and increasingly cruel dictatorship. By 1986, his People Power Revolution saw the electorate turn on him, and the United States pressured him to respect the electoral outcome and leave office. 27

A regime that assumes long-lasting, sweeping, and only vaguely defined authority as the Philippines did under Marcos can become a police state (sometimes called a security state )—that is, a state that uses its police or military force to exercise unrestrained power. When states do not operate within clearly defined legal rules, political scientists say that the government in those states has little respect for the rule of law .

Governments may also exercise unauthorized but legitimate forms of power. Although the absence of authority can be grounds for judging an exercise of power to be illegitimate, this is not always the case. Examples of unauthorized but legitimate government activities tend to fall at two ends of the spectrum of public importance: governmental actions that are generally considered rather insignificant and actions that are deemed to be of tremendous importance, especially in grave moments of crisis.

On one end of the spectrum, as a result of the federal National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, the legal age to purchase or publicly consume alcohol anywhere in the United States is 21. However, this law allows states to make exceptions to the age requirement for individuals under 21 who possess or consume alcohol in the presence of responsible parents. Not all states have created exceptions in their alcohol laws, and the possession of alcohol by anyone under the age of 21 is always technically illegal. 28 But in a number of these states there is such widespread sentiment that possession is acceptable in the presence of responsible adults that there is wide agreement that the state can exercise the unauthorized power to choose not to enforce the law under these conditions.

On the other end of the spectrum, during perceived moments of grave emergency, such as a dire terrorist threat, there may be broad agreement that the government may, legitimately exercise the unauthorized use of power. Princeton professor Kim Lane Scheppele notes that since 9/11 a number of world governments have made “quick responses [to terrorism] that violate the constitutional order followed by a progressive normalization.” 29 These actions might be limited in number, and the broader population may be unaware of their details and scope. Nevertheless, it is arguable that the population is aware that its government is taking unauthorized action in response to terrorist threats and that it supports the government’s right to do so.

The Illegitimate Exercise of Power and the Challenge of Revolutionary Change

Some regimes, though they have established lines of authority, may come to be broadly illegitimate over time. Throughout history, there are many examples of times when the sense that a regime was no longer legitimate led the people to revolt, either by sustained, widespread peaceful protests—such as in the Velvet Revolution in November of 1989 that led to the dissolution of the communist regime of Czechoslovakia—or by internal violent regime change—that is, the use of revolutionary violence. Revolutions intent on removing a constitution almost always seek to replace one constitution with another. Is there a standard of justice that transcends the constitutional law of a particular regime, a standard that can guide a people as they seek to free themselves from one constitution and replace it with another? Historically, in the Western political context, the standard of basic morality, justice, and social welfare has been the set of natural rights guaranteed by the natural law. More recently, the standard is referred to most often as fundamental human rights. (See also Chapter 2: Political Behavior Is Human Behavior and Chapter 3: Political Ideology .) The meaning of these concepts—natural law, natural rights, and human rights—is often contested, and this disagreement complicates any efforts to establish new constitutions to replace illegitimate regimes. Successful revolutionary change faces numerous challenges, including the fact that people might agree that a regime is not worthy of support, but their reasons for that opinion may differ. 30

In the 1930s and 1940s in India, Mahatma Gandhi employed civil disobedience to protest British imperil rule. One way a group can seek to change a law or even an entire governing system is to engage in civil disobedience , the nonviolent refusal to comply with authorized exercises of power. In the 1960s, civil rights groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. used civil disobedience to protest racial discrimination. Although both started out as small protest movements, they grew into movements capable of undermining the broad legitimacy of the governing regimes they opposed.

Methods of Developing Legitimacy

Widespread support for the right of the government to rule can come from a variety of sources. Max Weber argued that broad legitimacy develops in three primary ways. 31 The first of these is what he calls traditional legitimacy , where the governing regime embraces traditional cultural myths and accepted folkways. The United Arab Emirates can be considered an example of a regime with traditional legitimacy. Located in the far eastern section of the Arabian Peninsula, the seven small states that make up the UAE are joined together in a loose confederation, with each ruled by a monarch or emir. This system aligns with long-standing traditional practices of tribal chieftains associating together in a loose alliance to meet common objectives.

The second way legitimacy can accrue, according to Weber, is through charismatic legitimacy , when forceful leaders have personal characteristics that captivate the people. There are many examples of charismatic legitimacy throughout political history. Ruhollah Khomeini , a senior Shi‘a cleric who died in 1989, held remarkable appeal in Iran in the 1970s. Seen by many Iranians as a stern man of God, he was widely thought to be unaffected by the wealth, power, and corruption that so many Iranians saw as typifying the regime of the shah (or king) of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi . Khomeini was revered for his mysticism and his love of poetry. His personal magnetism played a large role in mobilizing Iranians to topple Pahlavi’s government and to replace it with the contemporary constitution of Iran, which establishes a Shi‘a theocracy , 32 a system of government in which religious leaders have authorized governmental power and possess either direct control over the government or enough authorized power to control the government’s policies. 33

Charismatic Che Guevara: Cuban Revolutionary

Revolutionary Che Guevara is revered in Cuba as an anti-establishment hero.

Weber’s third type of legitimacy is what he calls rational-legal legitimacy . This type of legitimacy develops as a result of the clarity and even-handedness with which a regime relates to the people. Take the example of Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), who as the prime minister of Prussia forged a united German state. This new regime gained legitimacy not only because of the shared German culture of the formerly independent German states, but also because of the efficiency of its state bureaucracy, which established a uniform system of law administered by trained public servants.

Based on Weber’s analysis, a regime can secure legitimacy if the following are true:

• The regime solidifies and advances the material interests of a large percentage of the population.
• The regime advances deeply held moral and/or religious principles or advances strongly valued cultural traditions.
• The regime both supports religious, moral, or cultural values and advances the people’s economic interests.
• Based on an emotional sentiment, the people feel a strong emotional connection with the state.
• Based on a habitual respect for the government, the people unreflectively support the regime.

Legitimacy can be thought of as emerging from the agency of the people, who give their support to the regime either as a result of rational reflection, emotional attachment, or the acceptance of customary ways of relating to political power. However, one should not think of the agency of the people, by which they confer legitimacy on the regime, as something that is necessarily wholly independent of the actions of the regime itself. It is possible for a regime to shape the way people relate to it. Regimes employ different tactics toward that end, including government-controlled education, state control of the media and arts and entertainment sectors, and associating the regime, at least in the people’s perceptions, with the cultural or religious views predominant among the governed. As such, although some regimes may well enjoy broad legitimacy by the free choice of their citizenry, the possibility also exists that regimes gain legitimacy through what economist Edward Herman and philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky call (in a different context) “ manufactured consent ”—that is, the shaping of the people’s response to the regime by state programs and activities designed to instill support for the regime, programs that might begin early in the citizens’ lives or that might affect citizens in subtle ways. 34 Examples of this can include widespread and rather blatant government propaganda , usually defined as misleading statements and depictions meant to persuade by means other than rational engagement, or subtle control over the content of what is taught in schools.

The contemporary government of the Eastern European nation of Belarus provides an especially vivid example of a regime seeking to manufacture consent through a coordinated effort to control access to information. Until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Belarus was a part of the Soviet state. After it established independence from the defunct Soviet Union, Belarus adopted a constitution that—on paper at least—requires free and fair elections for major government positions and affirms freedom of the press. Upon taking office as president after his victory in the 1994 election, the current Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko promised to allow broad civil liberties. 35 Yet, over the past 25 years, Lukashenko has exerted tremendous control over the media, including the internet. 36 Media content in Belarus is heavily restricted such that opposition voices are almost never depicted positively, 37 and the regime has used its control over the media to promote Belarusian independence and Belarusian nationalism. 38 It is in this context that Lukashenko has continued to be reelected. The support he receives can be seen as being, to a large degree, a function of his government’s control over the formation of public opinion. To this extent, Lukashenko has followed the tradition of communist nations such as the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, which have a long history of controlling their people’s access to information while advancing throughout society the state’s preferred political messages. The exercise of manufactured consent may not always be so overt in other countries, but it may be just as effective.

Failed and Fragile States

When a state’s ability to exercise control such that it can provide minimal conditions of law, order, and social stability deteriorates to a precariously low level, it is called a fragile state . Fragile states still assert the authority to rule but have serious difficulties actually ruling. The erosion of a state’s legitimacy can lead to state fragility. A fragile state can also occur when a broadly legitimate state has its capacity to provide order depleted as a result of an external force, such as an invading army. 39

If a fragile state loses the capacity to provide minimal conditions of law, order, and social stability entirely, it becomes a failed state . A failed state can emerge either when a state has collapsed so thoroughly that it lacks any governmental power altogether or when a shadow government has emerged—that is, an organization not authorized or desired by the government asserting rule over an area that effectively displaces and serves the same function as the official government. In this situation, internal violent regime change can occur, for if the shadow government becomes strong enough, it can mobilize sufficient power to dislodge entirely the existing regime and install itself as the authorized governmental entity. It may in the process have developed broad legitimacy, or it may simply have sufficient military power to take over the government, possessing the power of government and imposing laws that authorize its rule but not enjoying the wide support of the populace. A fragile government is one that is at serious risk of failing in either of these two ways or of experiencing violent regime change.

In the early 2020s, a shadow government formed in large sections of Afghanistan , and the forces of that shadow government carried out violent regime change. From 1996 until 2001, the Taliban , an extremist Sunni Islamic movement, ruled the Afghan government. In 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks orchestrated by Al Qaeda, a coalition of Western nations invaded Afghanistan. Due to concerns that the Afghan government had allowed the Al Qaeda terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden to operate within the country’s borders, this coalition removed the Taliban from government. The coalition replaced the Taliban government with a governing regime that had considerable elements of representative democracy.

In early 2021, a shadow government led by members of the Taliban resurfaced in areas of Afghanistan. In some of these areas, the Taliban enjoyed wide popularity. Writing in January of 2021, the reporter Mujib Mashal described one such area, the city of Alingar:

“Alingar is . . . an example of how the Taliban have figured out local arrangements to act like a shadow government in areas where they have established control. The insurgents collect taxes . . . and have committees overseeing basic services to the public, including health, education and running local bazaars.” 40

In August 2021, the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul, fell to Taliban forces, and the more democratic regime collapsed. The Taliban has since consolidated its power, issued laws authorizing its regime, and sought to secure legitimacy among the broad Afghan population. Whether Afghanistan’s restored Taliban regime will endure remains an open question.

The current regime of Afghanistan represents a clear example of a fragile state. Fragile states either have a tenuous ability to keep the peace, administer court and educational systems, provide minimal sanitary and health services, and achieve stated goals such as conducting elections, or they are at risk of harboring within them rival organizations that can achieve these goals. Somalia is another example of a fragile state. 41 In more than 30 years of civil war, the regime governing Somalia has at times been at risk of failing to provide even a minimal level of security and stability. The condition in the country has stabilized somewhat from its low point in the early 1990s, when the risk of famine was so acute that the United States deployed military troops in Somalia to protect United Nations workers providing humanitarian relief in the country (a deployment that became controversial in the United States due to significant US military casualties). 42 Somalia, however, still shows signs of fragility. Although the Somali government scheduled national elections to take place in the summer of 2021—the first to be held in decades—these elections have been indefinitely postponed in the face of continuing instability in the region. 43

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Opinion The Supreme Court’s Republican bias hangs over the Trump immunity case

The conservative justices must navigate a crisis moment of their own making.

It is naive and ahistorical to pretend that the U.S. Supreme Court floats above politics as a quasi-sacred institution. The court has always been political, particularly when it comes to preserving its own influence.

One of its earliest and most celebrated decisions, Marbury v. Madison in 1803, can fairly be seen as a power grab for the ages: Chief Justice John Marshall established that the court had the ability to strike down laws, declaring that this unelected body can override the wishes of the branches of government chosen by the people.

But precisely because the court has arrogated itself so much authority, it is always in danger of squandering the legitimacy of its claims, especially when it acts with exceptional arrogance or in a blatantly partisan way.

As members of its 6-3 conservative majority ponder how and when they will rule on Donald Trump’s absolute immunity claim, they should understand how much they have already done to paint themselves as instruments of the Republican Party and the political right. They have created a crisis moment.

You can see what such a crisis looks like by examining one of the court’s worst decisions, Dred Scott v. Sandford. It was politics all the way down: The court colluded with two Democratic presidents, James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce, in a blatant effort to stop a rising Republican Party and a popular movement seeking to end the spread of slavery.

By declaring in 1857 that people of African descent could never be citizens and that Congress could not restrict slavery in the territories, the court persuaded millions of northerners that the “slave power” — the rallying cry against the plantation South’s elite — dominated the government. The north struck back three years later by electing Abraham Lincoln president. We know what followed.

Despite the popularity of the recent movie “ Civil War ,” we are not on the verge of outright military conflict. But the conservative justices seem hellbent on taking a side in the searing partisan battle that is dividing the country into closely matched halves, at a cost to its own legitimacy and the nation’s confidence in the rule of law.

Consider its decisions undercutting the regulation of large political contributions , gutting the Voting Rights Act and slow-walking reapportionment cases aimed at protecting Black political representation. Together, these decisions empower the wealthiest and most privileged people in the country and undercut the electoral clout of long-marginalized citizens. There’s a clear direction here.

Add to this the invention of the “ major questions doctrine ,” through which the court has seized the power to strike down executive agency actions of “vast economic and political significance” unless Congress clearly authorized them. It’s a move that allows the court’s conservatives to throw out any regulations and executive actions by Democratic administrations that they don’t like.

When the court invalidated President Biden’s student loan debt relief program last year, Justice Elena Kagan rightly complained that in “every respect, the Court today exceeds its proper, limited role in our Nation’s governance,” based on the “made-up major questions doctrine.”

Responding to Kagan, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that it “has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.” No, what’s disturbing is the court itself going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.

Through such overreach, the court has created the cloud of suspicion that hangs over its deliberations on the former president’s absolute immunity claim.

Trump’s contention is both absurd and dangerous to a free republic. Yet in last week’s oral arguments, most of the conservative justices were more eager to worry about entirely hypothetical problems future presidents might confront than to deal with the facts before them involving a president who plainly tried to overturn a legitimate election.

If the court delays its ruling until late June or forces the trial court to litigate new issues it might raise, it knows it will be delaying Trump’s most important trial until after this year’s election. The court already fed skepticism about its motives in December when it denied special counsel Jack Smith’s request for the court to bypass the appeals process and fast-track a hearing on matters Smith knew the justices would want to address.

There is a way for the court to prove its willingness to suspend partisanship at least some of the time. Instead of wasting precious time to rule on issues not directly raised by this case, it could take up Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s suggestion that it confine itself to answering the question Trump raised: “whether all official acts [by a president] get immunity.” She proposed that it wait for a case that “actually presents” the issues that preoccupy the conservatives.

One of her fellow justices has made an excellent argument for this approach. “If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more,” Roberts wrote in a 2022 opinion . In the Trump case, he would do a lot for the court’s reputation by following his own advice and bringing another conservative with him.

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Isolated From West, Putin Projects Domestic Power at Inauguration

The event for the Russian president, who claimed his fifth term in a rubber-stamp election, included a church service that underscored efforts to give a religious sheen to his rule.

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By Valerie Hopkins and Anton Troianovski

Photographs by Nanna Heitmann

Valerie Hopkins reported from the Kremlin in Moscow, and Anton Troianovski reported from Berlin.

Vladimir V. Putin was inaugurated for a fifth term as president on Tuesday in a ceremony filled with pageantry and a televised church service, as the Russian leader tried once more to depict his invasion of Ukraine as a religiously righteous mission that is part of “our 1,000-year history.”

Mr. Putin took the presidential oath — swearing to “respect and safeguard the rights and freedoms of man and citizen” — with his hand on a red-bound copy of Russia’s Constitution, the 1993 document that guarantees many of the democratic rights that he has spent much of his 25-year rule rolling back.

Mr. Putin was re-elected in March in a rubber-stamp contest that Western nations dismissed as a sham. If he serves the full six years of his new term, he will become the longest-serving Russian leader since Empress Catherine the Great in the 18th century.

“Together, we will be victorious!” Mr. Putin said at the end of a speech after he took the oath in the Kremlin’s gilded St. Andrew’s Hall.

The ceremony was replete with pomp: An honor guard marched ahead of Mr. Putin. Elaborate chandeliers hung overhead and supporters stood behind a velvet rope applauding as the Russian leader strode to the stage. Outside, a heavy snow fell, unusual in May, even for Moscow.

Mr. Putin offered no new policy details in his speech, even though analysts expect him to make some changes to the makeup of his government later this week. He also said nothing about the tactical nuclear weapons drills that his military announced on Monday. (Russia’s neighbor and ally, Belarus, had announced its own snap exercises on Tuesday of the forces charged with being trained to use the nuclear weapons that Russia stationed in there last year .)

In a departure from the broadcasts of previous inaugurations, Russian state television dwelled at length on the church service blessing Mr. Putin after he delivered his speech.

“The head of state must sometimes make fateful and fearsome decisions,” Patriarch Kirill I, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, was shown telling Mr. Putin inside the Cathedral of the Annunciation on the Kremlin grounds. “And if such a decision is not made, the consequences can be extremely dangerous for the people and the state. But these decisions are almost always associated with victims.”

The scene underscored the Kremlin’s intensifying efforts to give a religious sheen to Mr. Putin’s rule and to cast his invasion of Ukraine as justified in Russia’s Christian tradition.

Ksenia Luchenko, an expert on Russian Orthodox Christianity at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the patriarch’s speech also appeared designed to hand Mr. Putin a religious carte blanche for any future violence he might unleash.

“It looks like, ‘Do whatever you want, because we trust you completely,’” Ms. Luchenko said in a phone interview. “He’s trying to sacralize any decision” Mr. Putin makes, she added.

In his inauguration speech, Mr. Putin also repeated his call for talks that many critics see as tantamount to a demand for capitulation by the West and Ukraine. “We do not reject dialogue with Western states,” he said.

“I will repeat that talks, including on issues of strategic stability, are possible,” he added, referring to arms-control negotiations with the United States that have been stalled since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. “But only on equal terms, respecting each other’s interests.”

Isolated from the West and under indictment by the International Criminal Court , Mr. Putin is projecting a power domestically that seems stronger than ever.

“Our president has the highest powers, more than the American president and even the Russian czar,” said Gennady A. Zyuganov, the leader of Russia’s Communist Party, as he arrived at the ceremony in the Kremlin. “A lot depends on him.”

More than 2,000 government officials, prominent supporters and administrators who are part of Russia’s institutions in occupied Ukraine had gathered to witness the tightly stage-managed inauguration.

As supporters assembled, they shared a message demonstrating Mr. Putin’s iron grip on their loyalty: that he would keep Russia stable, strong and peaceful.

Among the first to arrive was the American actor Steven Seagal, who said of Russia’s future, “With President Putin, it will be the best.” (Mr. Putin personally handed Mr. Seagal a Russian passport in 2016.)

Mr. Putin’s preordained election in March delivered him more than 87 percent of the vote, according to Russian election officials, with a voter turnout of almost 80 percent.

“Almost all the country voted for him,” said Aleksandr P. Petrov, a deputy in the Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament, striking the tone of absolute loyalty on display at the Kremlin. “Our support for the president is absolute, because our vision of development is taking place in the country.”

Mr. Putin pronounced the brief oath standing next to Valery Zorkin, the head of the Constitutional Court — a body that has steadfastly upheld Mr. Putin’s rollback of democratic rights.

The crackdown has been chilling to critics of Mr. Putin’s government. Just about all well-known opposition politicians have been jailed. The most prominent, Aleksei A. Navalny, died in a penal colony in the Arctic Circle in February.

His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, condemned Mr. Putin’s inauguration in a video posted on YouTube on Tuesday morning.

“Our country is being led by a liar, a thief and a murderer,” said Ms. Navalnaya, who lives outside of Russia. “But this will definitely come to an end.”

Ahead of Tuesday’s inauguration, Ukraine called on its allies not to recognize Mr. Putin as the legitimate president, citing the illegal holding of presidential elections in Russian-occupied Ukraine. Most Western countries boycotted the ceremony, although France sent its ambassador; the United States did not send a representative but the State Department said it would continue to recognize Mr. Putin as Russia’s leader.

“We certainly did not consider that election free and fair, but he is the president of Russia and is going to continue in that capacity,” Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, told reporters on Monday.

As in the past, the tightly scripted state television broadcast melded ceremonial pomp and a depiction of Mr. Putin as a humble, workmanlike leader. Before the ceremony, Mr. Putin was shown getting up from his desk, casually flipping through a sheaf of paper, walking down long and narrow corridors, passing uniformed guards and stepping into a Russian-made limousine that carried him across the Kremlin grounds.

As Mr. Putin was heading to the Kremlin for the ceremony, the chairman of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, told journalists that the Russian president was the envy of the world.

“Our president is the most effective leader among other countries,” Mr. Volodin said. “They envy us, and the tasks before us are understandable and clear, like never before.”

Ivan Nechepurenko, Alina Lobzina, Oleg Matsnev, Aurelien Breeden and Constant Méheut contributed reporting.

Valerie Hopkins covers the war in Ukraine and how the conflict is changing Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the United States. She is based in Moscow. More about Valerie Hopkins

Anton Troianovski is the Moscow bureau chief for The Times. He writes about Russia, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. More about Anton Troianovski