Trustworthy Government and Legitimating Beliefs

A trustworthy government is one that keeps its promises (or has exceptionally good reasons why it fails to), is relatively fair in its decision-making and enforcement processes, and delivers goods and services. A legitimate government is one that appeals to widely accepted justifications for its selection, maintenance, and policies. Investigations across history and countries reveal that the more trustworthy the government, the more likely it is to evoke observation of its laws and acquiescence to policies. Less clear is the link between perceptions that government is trustworthy and beliefs that it is legitimate, at least in countries claiming or trying to be democratic. Being trustworthy in practices and outcomes may contribute to perceptions of government legitimacy. However, trustworthiness is, at best, a necessary but not sufficient condition for legitimating beliefs. This chapter explores the relationship between the trustworthiness of government and its legitimacy by considering cases from both advanced democracies and state-building efforts. It argues that current democracies may need to refashion their moral economies—the extra-market reciprocal rights and obligations that link populations, governments, corporations, and all the other various organizations that make up the society—if they are to reestablish strong grounds for legitimacy.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the volume. It contextualizes the essays and sets out the organizational logic for the volume as a whole, presenting brief summaries of each chapter.

In Defense of Functionalism

This chapter provides a response to Anna Stilz’s chapter in this volume, “Legitimacy and Self-Determination.” I argue that Stilz’s Kantian approach to political autonomy and self-determination is vulnerable to a serious dilemma. Her account either cannot explain various intuitively wrongful instances of colonialism and annexation, or else it can only do so by departing from its Kantian foundations. I then defend a functionalist approach to political legitimacy, one that appeals to the pro tanto wrongness of involuntarily changing people’s political status. I argue, contra Stilz, that such a functionalist approach can adequately explain why certain cases of colonialism and territorial annexation are wrongful.

Official Intentions and Political Legitimacy

The case of President Trump’s travel ban raises the question of whether the intentions of public officials matter in determining the legitimacy of their actions. In recent years, philosophers and legal scholars have argued that intentions are never directly relevant to the moral permissibility of actions. This permissibility objection can be applied to theories of political legitimacy that make intentions relevant in specifying moral conditions for the exercise of political power. After surveying various ways in which intentions might figure into theories of legitimacy, I present the permissibility objection and then argue that it cannot be sustained in reflective equilibrium. Using examples of discretionary discrimination, including the travel ban, I argue that intentions are relevant to determining the legitimacy of official conduct. I then defend a doctrine of moral taint, which holds that skepticism about the actions of public officials is appropriate when they have previously taken similar actions on the basis of wrongful intentions.

Legitimacy and Self-Determination

While most traditional liberal theories hold that the justice of a state’s institutions suffices to ground a right to govern its population and territory, I argue that these theories face an important challenge: They are unable to distinguish between domestic and foreign rule, and they may even license benign colonialism. Drawing on Kant’s political writings, I argue that we should revise these traditional liberal theories, recognizing the importance of a second, self-determination dimension to state legitimacy. To be legitimate, a state must not only provide certain minimum conditions of justice to its population; it must also satisfy their interest in collective self-determination, in being authors of their political institutions. This chapter offers a specific account of this interest, which I call the political autonomy theory. To fully respect autonomy, individuals must not only enjoy certain rights over their own personal lives; they must also be part of a collective that pursues justice through rules they choose through the exercise of their own rational deliberative agency.

The Empirical Study of Legitimate Authority Normative Guidance for Positive Analysis

We employ key concepts in the normative study of legitimate authority to place the empirical analysis of legitimacy on firmer analytical foundations. Our critical review of empirical research on support for courts, regimes generally, and international organizations highlights the slippage between normative and positive approaches, while simultaneously drawing attention to problems of measurement and critical inferential problems rooted in limitations of research design. We then describe a simple theoretical model that formalizes these considerations. The model reveals conditions under which it is possible to isolate the effect of an authority’s legitimacy on citizen behavior net of extrinsic compliance motivations as well as environments in which examination of the antecedents of legitimate authority is most likely to be fruitful.

Evaluating Consensual Models of Governance

Two models of legal authority are compared: coercive and consensual. The coercive model functions through the ability of officials to create and maintain a credible risk of punishment for wrongdoing. It operates through perceptions of risk. The consensual model is based on peoples’ willing acceptance of the obligation to follow the law. People accept that personal obligation when they regard the law as legitimate. Data from several large-scale surveys suggest the importance of legitimacy to compliance and cooperation and in particular provide a better basis for understanding willing cooperation than does a risk-based model. A further analysis of the antecedents of legitimacy demonstrates that procedural justice is the key antecedent of legitimacy.

Legitimacy as a Right To Err

This chapter proposes that legitimacy (on at least one understanding of the protean term) is centrally a right to err: a right to make mistakes that set back interests of others that are ordinarily protected by rights. Legitimacy so understood is importantly distinct from authority, the normative power to impose binding (or enforceable) rules at will. Specifically, legitimate institutions have a distinctive liberty right to set back others’ interests that other agents normally lack. Their subjects in turn lack certain permissions to avoid, or redirect, the costs of the institutions’ mistakes in ways that would otherwise be permissible. Legitimate institutions have this liberty right because, and insofar as, they act for their subjects (in a specific sense) and do so only for the subjects’ sake. As a matter of fairness, (some of) the costs of the institutions’ actions are borne by the subjects for whom they are undertaken. In turn, where an institution fails to act for its subjects in the relevant way, it (and its officials) may have to bear the costs of its errors, which the subject is morally permitted to redirect by acts of resistance.

Political Legitimacy Under Epistemic Constraints

The aim of this chapter is to provide an epistemological argument for why public reasons matter for political legitimacy. A key feature of the public reason conception of legitimacy is that political decisions must be justified to the citizens. They must be justified in terms of reasons that are either shared qua reasons or that, while not shared qua reasons, support the same political decision. Call the relevant reasons public reasons. Critics of the public reason conception, by contrast, argue that political legitimacy requires justification simpliciter—political decisions must be justified in terms of the reasons that apply. Call the relevant reasons objective reasons. The debate between defenders and critics of a public reason conception of political legitimacy thus focuses on whether objective reasons or public reasons are the right basis for the justification of political decisions. I will grant to critics of a public reason conception that there are objective reasons and allow that such reasons can affect the legitimacy of political decisions. But I will show, focusing on the epistemic circumstances of political decision-making, that it does not follow that the justification of those decisions is necessarily in terms of those reasons.

On the Empirical Measurement of Legitimacy

For decades, Tom Tyler had led the charge of making legitimacy and procedural justice core concepts and variables in the empirical study of compliance and cooperation in the social sciences. In this chapter, after laying out a conceptual map of the three types of legitimacy and the roles that procedures can play in legitimation, I show that much of Tyler’s work focuses on providing support for two assertions: that a belief in the legitimacy of local authorities leads people to comply, cooperate, and positively engage with them, and that fair procedures are a powerful way to make people develop these beliefs. I then argue that both of these claims are misleading. On the one hand, Tyler’s operationalization of legitimacy distorts it beyond common meaning. On the other hand, Tyler only measures and shows the effects of perceptions of procedural justice, and thus merely gives reason to focus on reforming institutions such that they appear just, rather than become just. The only way to avoid this unhappy Machiavellian outcome, I argue, is to once again bring in moral argumentation to discussions of institutional reform.