Legitimacy, Popular Sovereignty, and Competing Justifications for Political Order

All governments require stories to tell their people about why they should rule, and why the people in turn should obey. This has been a core element to contestation over justified political order since the birth of modernity, as the American Revolution’s disputation against non-representative authority informed us two and a half centuries ago. 

In some particularly lazy tellings, the Revolution’s empire-breaking disputation has been discussed simply as a tale of a tax-hungry unaccountable monarch in London oppressing the nascent republicanism of the self-governing Thirteen Colonies. Yet ultimately our rebellious origin story was properly about the question of political legitimacy. Who can rule us and why? Understanding the complexity of this question is critical to understand the American past, as well as to understand the dynamics of politics worldwide.

One of the trickiest concepts in the study of political regimes is the idea of legitimacy. The great German social scientist Max Weber characterized legitimacy as “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.” Or in a gloss from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the “acceptance both of authority and of the need to obey its commands.” But as the reader can imagine, legitimacy is intangible, flexible, contextually-, temporally-, and highly case-dependent, and famously difficult to measure.

Yet political legitimacy is crucial to grasp if we wish to understand political systems, be they democratic or even highly authoritarian. A different German social scientist, Johannes Gerschewski, writes that political legitimacy is one of the “three pillars of stability” in authoritarian regimes that both justify and sustain their rule, including also co-optation (of both elites and masses) and repression. Both democracies and non-democracies require stories to tell their people about why they should rule, and why they in turn should obey. This has been a core element to contestation over justified political order since the birth of modernity, as the American Revolution’s disputation against non-representative authority informed us almost two hundred and fifty years ago. 

Claims of legitimacy deriving from non-representative foundations are perennial and common worldwide. Across authoritarian regimes justifications of political legitimacy include performance legitimacy (fulfilled promises of high economic growth and development), ideological legitimacy (justification based on a prescriptive framework vision of how the world is and ought to be), tutelary elite legitimacy (claims that special classes of people – aristocrats, clerics, party-elites, managers, experts, scientists – are better at ruling), emergency guardianship legitimacy (protecting the state or nation from extraordinary threat), stability legitimacy (status quo justification in the face of uncertainty or chaos), or traditional legitimacy (institutional authority derived from the longstanding prior existence of the same institutions), or divine legitimacy (form of rule justified by divine right). There are many more variations on all the above as well. 

Many of these forms of legitimacy can be found to one degree or another in democratic systems, of course – and no democracy can survive long without the ability to provide economic stewardship, internal order, and defense from threat. Yet modern democracy’s origin also developed an entirely new form of legitimacy, a derivation from Enlightenment thinking, powerfully justified during the American Revolution, and spread throughout the world by way of the French Revolution: popular sovereignty. 

The legitimacy claims of popular sovereignty were revolutionary and highly disruptive: the polity is legitimately ruled only through the active consent of the people who make up that polity. The political, social, and institutional implications of popular sovereignty are tremendous and far-reaching, including the widespread adoption of regular elections, the permanence of plenary assemblies in the form of parliaments and legislatures, directly elected heads of state, the normative goal of representative self-government as a modern and freeing form of political rule, and the gradual de-legitimation of non-elected monarchical executives relative to republican constitutional schemas of political order. Popular sovereignty is a modern idea, although one that draws from ancient roots – as its advocates in the 1700s made clear. 

But we must be careful. Popular sovereignty can have something of a utopian shine to it when taught pedagogically for either political or educational purposes. If the people rule, of course one therefore has democratic governance. The natural outflow from its legitimacy claims to the institutions of electoral democracy seem obvious and are correlated in many minds with other normative ‘liberal’ goods such as the rule of law, secularism, rights, and limited government. This is only sometimes true, however, and exploring debates at the beginning of the American Revolution can shine helpful light on why this is so. 

Indeed, popular sovereignty is in truth often asserted more as a theological or ideological belief, and one that can justify rebellion, regime change, and even reify a monarchical executive should he properly assent to being connected with a sovereignty-bearing people as much as it can undergird democratic systems. Popular sovereignty is not itself democracy, and its earliest proponents did not assume as such. They found it legitimating not for abstract process reasons, but for intrinsic ones that protected life, liberty, and property for a specific people, in accordance with divine and natural order. In this way, we can find both democratic and authoritarian ways in which popular sovereignty can be used in debates at the early and practical stages of its initial intellectual articulation. 

Two essays from the 1770s stand out as helpful in this regard: The Late Addresses for Blood and Devastation, and the Addresses Exposed, Together with the Idolatrous Worship of Kings and Tyrants, And the Americans Justified by Several Precedents from Scriptures, in Their Resistance to the Depredations and Violence of an English King and His Bribed Servile Parliament”published by William Moore in London in June 1776, and anonymous Y.Z.’s (perhaps a certain Dr. Sutcliffe) Political Propositions published in Leeds in November 1775. 

Written as rejoinders to John Wesley’s pro-Crown view against the colonists as being bound subjects of a sovereign and non-representative government in England, the pamphlets provide a consent and contractarian understanding of political order based in claims to popular sovereignty. Yet they both also understood these claims in terms of theology, the natural law, and traditional kingship, assigning an underlying ideological basis for popular sovereignty that is less about processes of elections and more about asserting that it is rule is on the behalf of the sovereign people, derived from explicit religious or ideological positions, and that the existence of sovereign popular government is hardly uniform across the world but rather acts as the right of a specific people in a specific time and place. 

Political Propositions focuses on the question of just taxation in the wake of wartime expenditures due to previous decades of war, which cut to the heart of the colonial disputes with London. In a patient style, the essay asserts a dichotomy between societies of slavery or serfdom and those of free people under their own sovereignty: “EVERY government, where the governors do at their pleasure dispose of the subject’s money, is arbitrary, and the subjects thereof must be slaves. This is then the grand criterion of slavery.” While not requiring republicanism, the Propositions rather makes clear that rule on behalf of the people – and the use of the public purse – is dependent on popular assent and acclamation. 

It goes on to explain in detail that the origins of the rights of parliament as an assembly institution of the British polity, are derived from original contractual agreements that vested sovereignty in the assembly by dint of popular consent. “As the power of continuing or dissolving government must be placed somewhere, it ought, upon every consideration, to be placed where nature hath placed it, in the people at large. [emphasis original]” Moreover, that contract does not allow for absolute or arbitrary rule, but “nothing more than a limited power” contoured by “the law of nature, or more properly, by the supreme law of the author of nature” – that is, God. This ultimately also ties the monarch’s hand when it comes to private property (and thus taxes), which is understood as protected by contract between people and sovereign. Yet as the British institutions of Crown and parliament have abrogated their representativeness and connection to the sovereign people, they have in turn lost their legitimate claims to govern or make policy. 

Moore’s Late Addresses for Blood and Devastation meanwhile, lays on a further theological and acclamatory understanding of political legitimacy and the true role of popular sovereignty. Rather than simply asserting that a contract of consent to govern exists and therefore limits power in a way aligned with natural law, he argues that the requirements for consent of the governed are ultimately Biblical in origin. In doing so, he makes clear a particularly (radical) Protestant understanding of theological imprimatur, claiming that “our meek christian addressers for blood and devastation” (that is, pro-Crown intellectuals) in fact ape the Ottoman Turkish sultanate and the Roman pontiff acting as “miserable idolatrous slaves” who go against Scripture. 

In doing so, Moore states that they ignore the nature of power and the need for monarchy to be tempered by accessional and acclamatory popular sovereignty to legitimate their rule and moderate their claims to total power. He argues simply that “kings and governors degenerate into tyrants” without such legitimation, and that claims by pro-Crown “addressers” that monarchs are “sacred,” (even when going against the natural law) rather than connected to the people and justified by that relation, lead to a condition whereby such monarchs’ sycophants “will do any thing, say any thing, and believe any thing.” In essence, popular sovereignty is the core means of maintaining a justified political order. 

What is critical about this debate, which ultimately sits as an historical example of the polemical environment within which the English-speaking peoples of the 18th century British Empire broke into disputation, war, and separation, is how little it rests on pure process and how much it rests on underlying justification for that process. It is not simply that sovereignty lies with a given people. It is that it lies with them by dint of a theological or natural law condition, recognizing that many other parts of the world hold no such legitimation claim and in fact are resigned to tyranny. The authors are quite clear that the requirements for a happy, justified political order and consensual government are based in a specific understanding of right that is not at all universal in empirical application. 

This is key, as the following two hundred years of human history have largely accepted Moore and Sutcliffe’s view of popular sovereignty but have often lost its original grounding in the natural law or theological requisites. While this is permissible – that is, a secularized and positivist form of popular sovereignty has been historically persuasive – it has not safeguarded very different uses of popular sovereignty. Indeed, if we take a naïve understanding of popular sovereignty as automatically conferring all the happy outputs of democracy, we will be quite surprised when confronting the real world. One example will suffice by noting the central place of popular sovereignty held by many modern authoritarian regimes. 

Authoritarian regimes have paradoxically become used to the idea of using and manipulating popular sovereignty since its entrance onto the global political scene at the end of the 18th century. Indeed, by the 2020s, the modal form of authoritarian rule is something called electoral authoritarianism, a type of political order which takes the constitutional trappings of democracy (elected presidents and parliaments, independent judiciaries, enumerated rights, and so on) coupled with the direct legitimacy claims of popular rule. 

Yet the uncertainty of democratic politics – who succeeds to apex political office in any given election – is replaced under authoritarian conditions with systematic pressure that results in one ruling group perpetuating its own power without end. Although absolute monarchies still exist, their numbers dwindle relative to the average dictatorship, which is firmly used to elections, legislatures, and popular sovereignty – but understood quite differently than in the Western democratic tradition. Contemporary authoritarian regimes often bathe themselves in the legitimacy of popular sovereignty, a sharp change from past practice. 

Unlike in the days of the American Revolution, when authoritarian systems such as Europe’s old regime monarchies remained at a loss for how to deal with claims for popular sovereignty, the contemporary era finds no such difficulty. Indeed, many of the most repressive polities of the 20th and 21st century, from communist party-states to national-liberationist single-party regimes, also grasped popular sovereignty as part of their justification for rule. Meanwhile, even where military juntas come to power or modern personalist dictatorships seize the executive, they often do so claiming true representation of the popular will or expressing a Caesarist effort to return power from a rapacious and indecisive oligarchy to a popular leader-figure. It is to the people that both democracies and authoritarian regimes of today continue to turn. 

The Revolutionary writers of the 1775-1776 pamphlet debate would say this is simply tyranny by another name, perhaps suggesting it as the result of a servile people incapable of following the natural law, as they had observed in looking at the kingdoms and empires of continental Europe and the Mediterranean in their day. But they would be remiss if they did not also recognize that modern authoritarian claims to rule now use the same format as the popular sovereignty they themselves asserted centuries ago. Kings who rule by fiat, having been granted absolute power, have been replaced by leaders, parties, and elected officials who use the very same claims of popular rule to justify non-democratic political order. 

The colonial insistence that the ruler be connected to the people – and acknowledge it as such – has been answered, but now the ruler also understands how to use such assertions to his or her benefit. And more to the point, the ruler can point to the very institutions the colonial writers sought to imbue with popular legitimacy (the acclaimed, consensual king; the representative parliament; the defense of personal property) as being fulfilled simply in an authoritarian mode. What better way to encourage economic development, ensure internal stability, and protect against threat than to marry such core political interests with claims that the sovereign people authorize the government to do so on their behalf. 

This matters as we look to the politics of the 21st century. Popular sovereignty is now the main vehicle for political legitimacy in most polities, from democracies such as the United States, France, and Italy to authoritarian regimes ranging from El Salvador to Turkey and Russia. The demand that “the power of continuing or dissolving government…ought… to be placed where nature hath placed it, in the people at large” is now formally true the world over, at least as claimed by those self-same governments and as officially designed through their constitutional institutions. Yet it does not follow in practice that such a condition will result in democracy. 

As the pamphlet writers themselves understood there is something difficult to capture about popular sovereignty and the legitimacy it confers to political order. It is a connection between a people and its government, underwritten by more than just a bare-bones contract, but one (for them) justified by theological principles, the natural law, and the acclamation of the monarch to rule in their own name. It is not universal but particular. And it does not mean process alone, but embodies a public claim to (self) rulership. Since the 1770s, we have found that such language, and such claims, are as comfortable in the mouths of authoritarian regimes as in democratic systems. Thus, we should be clear-eyed about what exactly we mean when we think about the sovereign people: Who exactly are they? To whom do they grant their sovereignty, and by whom is that claim asserted?