Can political decisions we make be right or wrong, or true or false? Are they just the expression of our personal interests, and consequently have no truth value? If they can be true or false, are there people who are better at getting it right or wrong? And if there are, does this imply that those who are better in making correct decisions should have political authority over others? These are some of the key questions I try to answer in this book.
Though democracy is highly valued and widely accepted as a collective decision-making procedure with legitimacy-generating potential, there is little clarity regarding the grounds of the value of democracy or its legitimacy-generating potential. The general idea is that the democracy is a good thing and that is should be a part of a just society. This, however, does not enable us to evaluate different democratic systems and procedures, as well as to improve the democratic decision-making process. In order to be able to do that, we need to understand what grounds the democratic legitimacy . This book represents an inquiry into the source of legitimacy-generating potential of democratic procedures.
In this book I defend the standard account of epistemic democracy , a position that grounds democracyās legitimacy-generating potential both in its moral and in its epistemic qualities. Though the very idea of an epistemic justification of democratic legitimacy might evoke very high expectations regarding its epistemic value, I argue no such thing: democracy does not have to be epistemically the best possible decision-making procedure. All it has to do is to perform better than other procedures that can meet the same moral requirements as democracy can (e.g. procedural fairness ). Democracyās epistemic value is nonetheless an important part of its legitimacy-generating potential, and increasing its epistemic value is a good way to generally improve the democratic decision-making process.
Apart from some considerations in the final chapter, I do not offer an account how existing democratic practices can be improved. What I am concerned with are fundamental values that ground the legitimacy-generating potential of democratic procedures. Though this book represents a theoretical framework, it does not imply that the ideas presented here cannot be implemented into contemporary politics. This, however, represents a separate task, probably one more appropriate for political scientists than political philosophers.
1.1 Political Legitimacy
1.1.1 Introduction
This part of the chapter gives a brief clarification of the central concepts in the discussion, as well as an overview of different accounts of political legitimacy. I briefly discuss the difference between political authority and political legitimacy, as well as the difference between the descriptive and the normative account of political legitimacy. I proceed by sketching two basic (monistic) accounts of political legitimacy, and argue that we should adopt the third, non-monistic account (one that combines legitimacy-generating elements from both basic accounts). Finally, I briefly discuss and endorse the liberal criterion of legitimacy as a basic standard against which various decision-making procedures will be evaluatedāin order to have legitimacy-generating potential, a decision-making procedure has to meet this standard. Furthermore, all other qualities of a procedure that could be considered as potential sources of legitimacy-generating potential have to be able to meet the liberal criterion of legitimacy.
1.1.2 Political Legitimacy
A discussion on political legitimacy lasts for more than 2500 years, and many prominent thinkers and philosophers have contributed with their own theories and accounts to this ongoing debate. However, an important turn in the debate took place several decades ago: John Rawls (1993, see also Peter 2011) shifted the discussion from the legitimacy of states and governments typical for the nineteenth and early twentieth century (Weber 1964) to the legitimacy of the decision-making process. It is also important to emphasize that Rawls started the debate on justice in 1970s with his book A Theory of Justice, and he shifted the debate to legitimacy in the 1990s with his book Political Liberalism. Political legitimacy is nowadays one of the central topics discussed within political philosophy and political theory, so it is important to make some specifications and define what kind of political legitimacy is this book about.
1.1.2.1 Political Authority and Political Legitimacy
Authority and legitimacy are connected by nonetheless distinct concepts. Authority is the moral power of one agent (e.g. the state) to morally require or forbid actions by others through commands. The state thus lacks authority if its requiring you to pay taxes has no tendency to make you morally required to do so (Estlund 2008, 2). A particular political decision is authoritative if one is morally obliged to follow it.
Legitimacy, on the other hand, is the moral permissibility of one agentās (e.g. the stateās) issuing and enforcing its commands owning to the process by which they were produced. The state acts illegitimately if it puts you in jail for not paying taxes when it is morally wrong for it to do so (Estlund 2008, 2). A particular political decision is legitimate if the one who issued and enforced it had the moral right to do so.
This book focuses primarily on political legitimacy since it analyzes different processes of making political decisions and tries to answer which qualities a decision-making process has to have in order to be able to make legitimate decisions.
1.1.2.2 Descriptive and Normative Concept of Political Legitimacy
Like many other ideas, political legitimacy can be understood as a descriptive as well as a normative concept . Its descriptive concept focuses on peopleās beliefs about how the right to rule is exercised, as well as on peopleās beliefs about the acceptability of a certain political decision. A particular political decision is thus legitimate if people see it as legitimate, and a decision-making procedure has a legitimacy-generating potential if people tend to accept the decisions produced by that procedure as legitimate. As Max Weber (1964, 130) puts it, political regime is legitimate when its participants have certain beliefs or faith in regard to it. Social and political scientists often use and analyze this concept of political legitimacy.
The normative concept focuses on a binding reason (or reasons) to support and not to challenge the coercive power of the state. Political decisions are seen as legitimate regardless of what other people think of them, as long as these decisions have certain legitimacy-generating qualities. When we try to assess whether a particular decision is legitimate, we do not analyze what other peop...